Dandelion

Everyone knows Harry Potter's story; his parents died and he lived, the authorities came and retrieved him from his mother's dead arms and he was barely a year old. Draco Malfoy wonders if rigor mortis had set in by then, if they had to pry him free. They must have wiped the blood off his face and found the scar; what a shock it must have been. In his personal version of the story Draco always imagines that there was a lot of blood, though he knows that Avada Kedavra is not a bloody spell. He imagines that they had to bathe the infant Harry Potter in the bathtub just across from the room where his parents lay dead, that the water had turned pink and then red as they mopped the blood off him. Even in his imagination Harry did not cry. He looked up at his guardians with a serious look on his scrubbed-pink face, scar burned fresh into his forehead, crusted blood on his eyelashes. He would sit there naked in the water and look noble, tragic, and serene.

Not even tragedy like that can touch him; he turns it into something else. He redeems it when he touches it.

Even then he was a hero, he was destined. Everyone knew it. Draco knew the entire story before he was four years old, he knew it detail for detail. At school his name would come up often; "Does Harry Potter have to do maths?" the little girls would ask. "Does Harry Potter drink his milk? Can Harry Potter fingerpaint? Does Harry Potter play exploding snap?" The answers were always, "I don't know," or "yes, yes of course he does!"

One year Draco even had a teacher who would use his name to shame them: "You're aren’t paying attention. Harry Potter would pay attention," or "You've tracked mud across the classroom! Harry Potter wouldn't do that!" They would bow their heads and think, no. I'm not Harry Potter. I'm not as powerful as that, I'm not as good as that. Once a little girl burst into tears because the teacher said that Harry Potter didn't like little girls who pulled people's hair. Who wanted to be the one Harry Potter didn't like?

It took Draco years to get over the hero worship, the hero resentment, to stop feeling a little shiver of excitement whenever Harry Potter walked into class or the Great Hall or just the corridor, his hair damp and his tie hanging loose over his shoulders. Even now Draco is not certain that he is completely free of it, or ever will be. What would Harry Potter think? The words were hammered into his brain in the voice of a school teacher, firm and reprimanding. It could still shame him, the idea of perfect Harry Potter, still as a statue, looking down at him like some kind of wounded saviour.

All through school Draco envied him. He envied him his friends, the girls who threw themselves at him even though he never seemed to notice, the way everyone sort of hushed when he walked into a room, the way he was loved by so many people. Once Draco had seen him in Diagon Alley alone before school started; Draco was poking around waiting for his father and Harry was stumbling along, looking down at his feet. He looked very sad, and Draco couldn't imagine why; he was carrying a parcel and looks as though he had just gotten a hair cut. His clothes were shabby, it was true; Draco imagined at the time that this was a way to underscore his normalcy. "Look at me," it said, "I'm just an average kid, I don't have fabulous clothes." Only the rich can afford to look that scruffy. Only the very confident don't try so hard to look perfect. Grubby old denim and frayed shirts. Draco resented that too. At least Harry could bother look the part. At least he could stop denying it, he could stop playing up the 'poor orphan' angle and making people feel even more sorry for him, the bedraggled hero. As Draco watched him walk past, Harry stumbled a little, caught himself, wiped his nose with the back of his hand and kept walking without looking up.

Once, on a Hogsmede weekend, Draco had seen an old woman pull Harry to her ample bosom and hug him, whispering something to him with her eyes shut tight. They all wanted him, they all want to sit him down at their kitchen tables and feed him, they want to darn his socks and brush his hair and hug him and wipe away tears that should have been there but never were. They all want to touch him because he is the embodiment of something everyone wants; a bit of purity, bravery, heroism, peace, love. You can see it sometimes, that love his mother felt for him, etched into his face. Draco thought it was pride for a long time, but now he knows that it's just love, and that Harry himself can't see it.

It has been seven years, several of them long, painful, violent years since they'd seen each other, and almost everything has changed. Almost everything, but not Harry. He still looked down when he walked, he still stumbled a little. He still looked sort of sad. When they met again Draco was reading the paper, walking toward his new London flat when someone stopped him. Granger, of all people.

"Draco Malfoy," she said, the way you say it when you don't quite believe who you're seeing, that kind of triumphant I know you, that did you think I wouldn't recognize you kind of tone. As if he were testing her memory.

"Ms. Granger," Draco said, surprised at first, and then less so. He knew she lived in this part of London, he even knew it was on a street in this little neighbourhood, though at the time he didn't remember the name of it.

They had come to a kind of agreement across the distance, from the Birmingham office where Draco was working to the London head office where she was. It was a kind of respectful truce, built purely on the fact that they worked for the same department. They did not need to speak to each other, but saw each other's names on files, commenting on each other's assessments and suggestions and reports. Strangely they agreed most of the time, and the first time Draco had seen her strong objection to a motion, her angry handwriting describing exactly why this was precisely the wrong move at this time, he was oddly impressed. He signed off with a short "what she said" note above his name, which he knew she would see the following day. They had become a unified front without ever meeting face to face. Once she had responded to one of his reports with one word, "Exactly." Somehow their former war of words had turned into a useful partnership.

"I thought we might be seeing you around here," she said. "I heard a rumour that you were moving back to London." She smiled and nodded to the man next to her. "Didn't I tell you?"

He was smiling. "You did," he said to Hermione. "How are you finding London, then?" He turned and looked at Draco, still smiling, but a little dubious. He had that look that said I can't believe I'm actually having this conversation. Draco wondered if this man was someone else at their department he was supposed to know and tried to conjure up a name. He was about to ask Hermione to introduce him to her friend when he saw the scar.

It was Harry. Draco felt his stomach drop, the exact same way it did when he realized that he had accidentally asked Harry Potter about his parents when he was eleven years old at Madam Malkin's. Oh, your parents are dead? Sorry about that. How could he not have recognized him? What would Harry Potter think? the voice in his head was asking. Well, for one, he'd think I'm an idiot.

They were all gracious. Draco had not expected that, he had not expected to be embraced. They invited him to dinner, to lunch, for coffee, to a Muggle theatre to watch films, which by turns terrified and delighted him. They threw him a housewarming party. They brought gifts. The first time he got one of these invitations he was nervous, he knew it was a test and he wanted to pass. He screwed it all up the first time, and here he had a second chance. No one wants to be the one Harry Potter hates, after all. Not even Draco, the one Harry Potter really did hate, at one time.

They only talked about the past in sanitized versions. Great Quidditch matches, brutally hard Arithmancy units, the antics of Hufflepuffs, the best and worst meals in the Great Hall. Ron Weasley laughed at Draco's stories and that was a great comfort to him. Even Ron was in on this act, and Draco was touched. Ron's sister Ginny was quiet but she remembered things everyone else had long forgotten; Professor Trelawney's godawful shoes, the time Snape had walked around an entire morning with toilet tissue stuck to his heel, the owl that crashed into the Ravenclaw table and the legs gave out, dropping breakfast plates on everyone's lap. There was no mention of duels, arguments, vicious words back and forth, Dementors, threats, or the fact that Draco has the Dark Mark on his arm. His story is old and he knows they are all aware of the details. For once he feels as though he might understand Harry in this one way; everyone knows the details the events that shaped his life, everyone has read them in the paper. Betrayal, confession, repentance, forgiveness, ostracization, acceptance.

"We all make mistakes," Dumbledore had said to him at the time. "Your actions will speak for you now."

He enjoyed the Muggle films, as it turned out. He liked the theatres they took him to; he liked the plush seats and the smell of popcorn. He was impressed by the massive screen in front of them, the sheer size of everything he saw happening on it. The first time he kept calling up loudly at the screen, asking the people in the picture what they were doing, or suggesting courses of action. Harry and Hermione couldn't stop laughing,

"Why don't they answer me?" Draco asked, bewildered. "Is there some rule?"

"They can't hear you!" Harry laughed. "These are Muggle films, remember?" He never entirely kicked the habit, he couldn't quite remember that these moving pictures were not like every moving picture he had ever seen, and he was shocked every time someone behind them or in front of them or beside them in the theatre gave him a murderous look and shushed him.

"What?" he would say, affronted. "He shouldn't go through that damn door, what did I tell him? Look!" Harry and Hermione would laugh and laugh.

When Draco learned that you could rent these films and watch them in the privacy of your own home, or, rather, at Hermione's home or Harry's, he was thrilled and rented nine of them all at once.

"Draco, you have to return them tomorrow," Harry explained. "Do you want to watch them all?"

"Sure!" Draco said. He brought take away to Harry's flat too, Chinese. It was only him and Harry in the end, just the two of them; Hermione was tired and Ron had taken her home after dinner. First there was a horror movie, which Harry laughed through from start to finish and Draco shouted much helpful advice that was never, ever taken. After that a comedy, and then a rather gripping drama. By then it was past midnight and they were both drunk.

"You know," he said, leaning over toward Harry, "I'm really sorry." He vowed never to bring up the past, there were things he simply could not say, but by then his stomach was warm with alcohol and he wanted to say it anyway.

"Yeah," Harry nodded. "I know." He smiled, tousled Draco's hair a little, and then dropped his hand onto Draco's shoulder. "I know. Me too. It's over now."

After that he spent the day with Harry when the others are off busy, when Ron and Hermione are visiting the burrow and preparing for nuptial bliss, when the weather had finally turned warm again. Draco told Harry that he had always idolized him, that he had been trained to idolize him, no matter what his father said.

"He never asked me to be friendly with you," Draco admitted. "I wanted to be your friend because...well, because everyone wants to be your friend, Harry."

He didn't asked about the blood, about the rigor mortis. He likes Harry too much to ask such graphic and rude questions, particularly when he knows that Harry doesn't know any more about it than Draco does. Harry hasn't read all the stories about it, in fact, so Draco probably knows more. Draco knows that Harry doesn't remember any of it, he doesn't remember his parents, he doesn't remember Voldemort giving him the scar. He doesn't know if he was crying when Sirius Black found him.

Though he did ask about why Harry doesn't see his family. They had been spending time together for almost seven months by then and Draco had never heard Harry mention his family. Everyone knew they were Muggles. It never occurred to Draco that Harry would hate them, that they would hate Harry.

He pulled the truth out slowly. The baggy clothes, living in a closet under the stairs, the strange and ridiculous token gifts his family would send him, just to underscore how much they hate him. Anti-wizard sentiment that, if Draco had known while he was in school, would have made him shake his head and loudly denounce Muggles everywhere. Now he just thinks it, he wonders why Harry didn't turn again them, why he insisted on protecting them instead.

While Draco sat in elementary school and the little girls cried because Harry Potter wouldn't play exploding snap with them, when the teachers told them that he wouldn't want to talk to them because they had been bad, Harry was holed up in a closet listening to someone else's birthday celebrations outside. He was sitting in a room in the summer time starving. While Draco envied him, all those years, Harry Potter had no friends and no one loved him.

Well, no one that he knew. The truth was that everyone loved him, but what did it matter.

"Then I went to Hogwarts," Harry said. "And everything changed." He smiled when he said it. Draco remembered it all: the teasing, the harassment, Rita Skeeter and the constant stories in the Daily Prophet, the professors who were secretly trying to kill him, the professors who kept mournfully predicting his death, the students who died in his place, the jealousy, the suspicion. Watching his friends suffer because of him, suffering himself. The pain of that scar, knowing the way no one else did that it was him and only him who could prevent Voldemort from killing them all, from destroying the world. He was eleven years old when he first realized all this. Draco was baffled.

Harry pushed his hair out of his face and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich. "You want one?" he said. "It's lunchtime, you should eat."

After lunch he cleaned the bathroom, still talking to Draco, still answering his questions. His parents, in the mirror of Erised. His godfather, wrongly convicted of murder, so close to taking him from his horrible aunt and uncle but failing to. The day before Harry's eighteenth birthday, when that same aunt and uncle gave him a ratty old suitcase and told him to get out by midnight.

"I should do my laundry," he said, looking at the hamper in his bedroom. "Maybe tomorrow. You want to go out for dinner? It's either that or we go shopping first."

It took Draco a week to process it all. The tragedy of Harry's life, laid out before him in such frank terms, made him feel sick. He thought about all the old tropes, the stereotype of Harry Potter he's been carrying around in his head all his life, and saw all at once that it's entirely true and entirely false.

After a week he arrives on Harry's doorstep at half eleven at night. Harry is wearing pajama bottoms and a t-shirt and his hair is sticking up all over the place. The television is on and Draco can hear a newsreader announcing Muggle events. Harry smiles and rubs the back of his neck.

"Hi," he says. "Come on in. Something wrong?"

Draco feels very nervous and very touched. Why should Harry trust him, after all. What he doesn't know could kill him. What he doesn't know is that Draco is not honest, he is not redeemed. He is a spy and the mark on his arm is not just a sad reminder. He doesn't know that Draco has been slowly engineering his way into the Ministry, garnering respect so that the other shoe can drop. He has been passing information back to the Death Eaters for years; he is the mole they have so long been trying to route out, with no success.

They would never suspect him, because in their universe a repentant man is a repentant man. They don't believe in Trojan horses anymore and Draco has proven himself. Dumbledore has put his stamp of approval on Draco and even Hermione Granger will vouch for him. Harry Potter opens his door for him in the middle of the night without fear.

"There's something I need to tell you," Draco says. "I need your help."

They could have planted Harry Potter anywhere. They could have just set him in a tent on the edge of godforsaken nowhere and he would still have turned out alright. They could have put in on the lip of a dragon's den while he was still in diapers and he would have come out just like this; certain that what he understands to be right actually is, always honest, fair, devoted, genuine, with just with a few more scars from the fire. He's like dandelions, growing up any which way, always bright and pointing toward the sun. That scar on his forehead is the only mark on him, it's the only sign that anything bad every happened to him, and even that became a triumph. Draco knows that he was right about Harry, in the end. They could wash the blood off of him and he would never cry, and it would never stain him.