A/N:Well, hello there. How are you all doing? If you enjoy the fanfic, comments, reviews, and power stones would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for reading!
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A true Malfoy never lets his emotions show. He observes carefully before drawing conclusions, rather than allowing anyone to glimpse the workings beneath the surface.
Draco was such a Malfoy. Or rather — shaped by long, dark years of memory — he was no longer the arrogant, impulsive boy he had once been. He had gradually become something more cautious, more deliberate.
Though that approach had its limits where his parents were concerned. They were entirely unaware of the dramatic change that had taken place inside him, and still saw him as an ordinary eleven-year-old. If their proud, headstrong son suddenly appeared quiet and withdrawn, they would notice immediately.
What would he tell them, then? Draco hadn't worked that out, and he had no desire to say anything alarming — not yet.
He had grown accustomed, over those long years, to trusting no one. He no longer harboured any hope that anyone would truly understand him — not fully.
Not even his parents, who loved him.
So when Draco appeared at the breakfast table, he did his best to project the lively manner appropriate to an eleven-year-old boy, drawing on what his memories had preserved of those early days. Clearly, he succeeded well enough. Lucius and Narcissa went on enjoying their breakfast, served by the house-elves, without any sign that something was amiss.
Even so, Draco could not stop himself from stealing glances at them.
They looked so young — far younger than he remembered them.
His father's face was free of lines, untouched by the haggardness and exhaustion that had come to define it. He wore his favourite snakeskin suit, his platinum-blond hair impeccably styled, every strand catching the morning light.
His mother was still breathtakingly beautiful, effortlessly elegant in every gesture. That proud, regal face she kept carefully composed for the outside world softened into something warmer only here — only for her husband and her son.
Draco grew increasingly certain that his past life memories were genuine. Lucius and Narcissa were discussing precisely the same things he remembered: estate affairs, Ministry of Magic intelligence, the quiet manoeuvring that occupied so much of Malfoy family life.
"Cornelius Fudge actually applied for the Order of Merlin, First Class — for himself — and intends to award the medal to himself as well…" A faint look of contempt crossed Lucius's face.
"He does seem to be a man utterly consumed by power and status," Narcissa said leisurely, taking a sip of her tea. "We do appreciate men of that sort, don't we? Vain and weak, short-sighted and easily guided. One can only hope he is as fond of gold as he is of glory…"
Lucius inclined his head slightly in agreement.
Yes — just as he remembered. His parents were already considering how best to cultivate a relationship with this self-congratulatory Minister of Magic.
Draco could even predict with confidence that when the house-elves brought out the final dessert, the conversation would turn to him.
"So," Lucius said, lifting the small silver dessert spoon as though appraising the pudding before him. "Durmstrang or Hogwarts — which is it to be?"
Draco did not answer immediately.
In his memory, he had once blurted out an answer without thinking, only to be met with cold disdain. His father had dismissed the response curtly, calling him a reckless little fool who had not bothered to think.
He had no intention of earning that again.
Lucius had always been exacting with his son — in everything. He had a habit of delivering sharp verbal rebukes the moment Draco became carried away with pride, pulling him back down to earth. His intentions, Draco could now see, had been good. But what Lucius had never understood was the lasting damage his relentless criticism could do. Under the weight of those cutting words, day after day, Draco had grown into a boy riddled with both arrogance and insecurity — proud on the surface and perpetually uncertain beneath.
No one could say Lucius Malfoy did not love his son. During the war, he had finally revealed the tenderness buried within him — a paternal love that had almost never surfaced in peacetime. It was like starlight, Draco thought — only visible in the dark, rarely seen in the full light of day.
In the end, his father had probably never fully grasped the weight of what his withering words cost his son. Draco took a measured sip of tea, keeping his expression composed.
For most of his childhood, Lucius had reserved what little warmth he openly showed for Narcissa. Only with his mother could Lucius reveal anything resembling tenderness, and even that Draco had barely noticed as a child.
In his previous life, he had never once heard his father say "I love you" to his mother in front of him. His parents rarely expressed affection directly, and the occasional quiet intimacy between them had struck young Draco as little more than the performance of a well-arranged union — two people bound by shared bloodlines and mutual advantage.
Their personalities were entirely different: his father stern, precise, and demanding; his mother warm, patient, and circuitous. Less a devoted couple, he had once thought, than partners in a longstanding arrangement.
It was only when everything began to fall apart that he had seen something different. His mother had never left his father — not when he was imprisoned, not when every respectable door in the wizarding world was closed against them because of the stain on the Malfoy name. And his father, that autocratic, unyielding man, had surrendered his certainty in those final days and listened — truly listened — to his wife, trusting her alone.
Could there be something like love between them, beneath the interests and the composure? Draco wondered, watching them from beneath his lashes.
"I want Draco to go to Hogwarts." Narcissa looked up at her husband, a faint smile on her face, and said precisely what Draco had been expecting: "The son of a school governor shouldn't find himself at any disadvantage there, should he?"
"Of course not…" Lucius set down his spoon and leaned back in his chair, his gaze resting on his wife with an ease he rarely showed. "Draco will be very well received at Hogwarts, naturally. But you're aware of Dumbledore's rather narrow views on certain branches of magic. I worry our son's education might suffer for it…"
Narcissa's expression shifted slightly. "But Durmstrang's campus isn't even on English soil. Somewhere on the Continent — no one seems quite sure where. I've heard it's dreadfully cold there."
"I have something of a connection with the headmaster — Igor Karkaroff — so Draco would want for nothing there," Lucius said, turning his snake-headed cane idly between his fingers.
A Death Eater's friendship, Draco thought. He kept his face perfectly neutral.
Karkaroff — a craven man, whatever his academic reputation. The moment he heard the Dark Lord had returned, he had abandoned his post and fled. He was hardly someone worth attaching oneself to. Draco rather suspected he would prove even less useful than Dumbledore, though he kept that particular opinion well buried.
The name Dumbledore brought the Astronomy Tower rushing back unbidden — the smell of night air, the flash of green light, the terrible and absurd finality of it. He shut the memory down before it could take hold, pressing it firmly back, and recited silently: Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, the twelve uses of dragon blood, the seven hundred fouls recorded in Quidditch history.
"Is there any better way to distract yourself than reciting facts?" a girl's voice said in his memory, her chin lifted just so.
"You were right, Granger," Draco thought. "It does work."
Narcissa, sharp as ever, caught the brief shadow that crossed her son's face.
"Draco, darling, let Mother hear what you think," she said gently. "Which school would you prefer?" She assumed his quietness was simply the result of being talked over during the adults' conversation.
His mother's care for him had always been this way — open, immediate, never restrained the way his father's was. That had never changed.
As for the question of school, Draco had already reached his conclusion somewhere between the main course and dessert.
His parents' behaviour this morning had matched his memories with near-perfect accuracy. The evidence was difficult to argue with: those memories from last night were almost certainly real.
He would call them his past life, for want of a better term. And this present moment — this smaller body, this younger face, these familiar rooms — might be described as a rebirth. He had lived through enough in those memories to feel he had already seen the arc of an entire lifetime.
If everything from that past life was genuine, and the coming years would unfold as he remembered, then he had to think carefully about what lay ahead.
There was still time. Several years in which to plan, to prepare, to position things differently.
He had briefly considered the idea of leaving England altogether — putting distance between himself and the bloodshed, perhaps at Durmstrang. But he had abandoned that thought almost as quickly as it arose. Durmstrang might offer temporary safety, but the moment the Dark Lord returned, there was nowhere on the Continent far enough — hadn't Karkaroff proved that?
Hogwarts held its own dangers. But he had years of memories to draw on, and he would not repeat the same failures. He knew the terrain now, in a way he hadn't then.
There was also the matter of the Malfoy family's legacy. Centuries of history were rooted in English soil. The estate, the bloodline, the name — they had stood on Wiltshire ground through storms that would have broken lesser families. To simply abandon all of that was not a solution. It was a disgrace of a different kind.
The Malfoy family could surrender many things, but not their foundation. Flight was not the answer.
And there was one more reason — quieter than the rest, and harder to name. A faint, half-formed memory. Something unfinished that had never quite resolved itself. A hope he had not entirely allowed himself to hold, that had shattered and left behind a bewildering, aching residue.
"Hogwarts," Draco said at last, looking up at his mother and arranging his features into what he hoped was a reasonably innocent smile. "I'd like to be close enough to come home for Christmas."
He caught his father's almost imperceptible frown from the corner of his eye.
Lucius was bothered by his son's apparent preference for home over ambition — or perhaps, more honestly, by the prospect of his and Narcissa's quiet time being interrupted.
Father, Draco thought, with a calm he would never have managed at eleven the first time around — that stern face of yours no longer frightens me. I know now that you love me. Even if you've never once been able to say so.
He pressed on, with an expression of wide-eyed guilelessness: "And Professor Snape will be there — he's the Head of Slytherin, and rather accomplished in the Dark Arts. I'd very much like to learn from him."
Lucius found he had no particular grounds to object.
After the meal, Narcissa left the dining room at a brisk, satisfied pace. Draco suspected she had gone directly to her study to compose the letter confirming his enrollment.
Lucius lingered by the table. He fixed his eleven-year-old son with a measured look and said, in his most authoritative tone, "Stop performing for your mother like a small child. It's beneath you. You are not a little boy anymore. And since you've chosen to study here in England — at least preserve some dignity." He leaned down slightly, his tall frame making Draco acutely aware of his current diminutive stature. "A Malfoy upholds the family's honour in everything he does. Apply yourself. If I do not hear that you are working seriously, you will not be returning home for Christmas."
Draco met his father's gaze steadily. "Yes, Father," he said.
Lucius studied him for a moment — studying, Draco suspected, the unusual absence of panic or wounded pride in those grey eyes, replaced instead by something almost like quiet amusement.
It seemed to unsettle him slightly. He cleared his throat. "Tomorrow, your mother and I will take you to Diagon Alley for your school supplies. Consider what else you might need, and we'll see to it then." With that, he turned and left, cane tapping against the floor.
Draco sat alone with the extra helping of chocolate pudding his father had left at his place, and let himself smile — just briefly.
His father was still so terribly awkward about it all.
In his memory, they had had a conversation very much like this one, at this same table.
And what had he done then?
He had fallen to pieces. Driven to the edge of tears by his father's cold and threatening tone, he had gone to find his mother and wept. He had convinced himself that his father was growing more distant by the day — that the man he admired perhaps didn't care for him at all, and that only his mother truly loved him.
He had been too young, then, to read the expectation hidden beneath his father's severity. Too young to notice the significance of a second helping of chocolate pudding, saved and set aside.
Draco could have snapped his fingers and had the house-elves bring him as many portions as he liked — that was never the point. The point was that Lucius, in his stiff and thoroughly impractical way, had saved it for him.
That kind of gesture might be legible to an adult. To a small, proud, easily wounded boy, it was invisible.
After his parents had gone, Draco was finally free to drop the performance. With the same unhurried deliberateness his father always brought to the table, he finished his pudding slowly, turning his decision over in his mind one final time.
Hogwarts.
His seven years there had not been what he had imagined they would be. He had been made to contend, day after day, with the infuriating Potter, the mockery of the Weasleys, and the formidable Granger.
Draco grimaced involuntarily — and a reflexive chill ran down his spine. Even now, years removed from it, the memory of that punch Granger had landed square across his face remained remarkably vivid.
If she hadn't been Potter's closest friend. If he hadn't been so insufferable at the time. If he had shown that Muggle-born girl even a fraction of the respect she had clearly deserved...
She was, after all, far from stupid. Quite the opposite.
His father had never missed an opportunity to compare her examination results to Draco's, which had filled him with shame and then fury — unable to best a girl whose blood, by every measure Lucius respected, ought to have put her at a disadvantage.
As a child, Draco had revered his father, feared him, and admired him in equal measure, treating every word he uttered as settled truth. He had wanted more than anything to earn that complete approval — to become the Malfoy his father looked at with unguarded pride — and he would have given almost anything for it.
That desperate need had clouded his judgement badly. It had caused him to suppress his own truer feelings and exhaust himself stoking a rivalry that had never served him.
He had been used to being the centre of attention — to the spotlight, the admiring looks, the effortless distinction of being a Malfoy. That was what any boy of his position expected.
Potter had stolen that from him. Or rather, Potter's presence had been so overwhelming — the way the moon outshines even the most brilliant stars — that Draco's own considerable brightness had been rendered, by comparison, somehow dim.
That contrast had enraged him in a way he hadn't even understood at the time. He had hurled himself into a pointless, grinding conflict, trying to attack from every angle, winning nothing and exhausting himself in the process.
Looking back across those seven years now, Draco found his past self simply absurd.
He had no interest in repeating any of that. He had more important things to do. Real, formidable enemies who would actually threaten everything he cared about.
The Dark Lord — that name which still could not quite be spoken aloud — had not yet returned. But he was stirring somewhere in the darkness, gathering himself, and before long he would reach into the wizarding world again and begin to tear things apart.
The Malfoy family's guiding principle had always been this: the greatest glory lay not in never falling, but in rising after every fall.
If those memories represented a catastrophic defeat for Draco Malfoy, then this moment — right now — was the chance for something different.
It was not too late.
Not too late to pull clear of all that filth and shame.
There was still time to protect the Malfoy name.
There was still time to make a different choice — to seize the moment before it slipped away as so many others had.
Those Death Eaters, those werewolves, those brutal and lawless creatures — they would never again set foot in Malfoy Manor. They would never again frighten his parents in their own home.
How he had come to possess these memories, or how he had found himself restored to eleven years old — those questions seemed almost secondary now.
What mattered was the time, and the place, and the fact that he was still here, with a choice ahead of him.
In his past life, Dumbledore had told him from the heights of the Astronomy Tower that he could still choose. That it was not too late.
He had hesitated — had wanted, in that moment, to try something different — but by then Dumbledore was already beyond saving, and the green light had flared, and the Dark Mark had burned against the sky.
He had missed that chance. And then, through hesitation after hesitation, he had watched every subsequent chance slip through his fingers until there was nothing left but ruin and regret.
But he had been reborn. He was safe. He was whole. And he had a choice.
Was this Merlin's doing? A warning? A second chance?
Draco did not want much.
He was not seeking any grand triumph.
He was not so arrogant as to believe that being reborn would make him capable of defeating the Dark Lord on his own.
At the very least — keep the Dark Lord from regaining his full strength. Use every advantage he possessed, every scrap of Slytherin cunning, to slow the resurrection and blunt the catastrophe. Trip him. Render him ineffective for as long as possible.
And ultimately — protect the Malfoy family. Protect the small world they had built. Protect the people who mattered to him.
The Malfoy family had weathered hundreds of years of storms and still stood on the plains of Wiltshire, unbowed. With all of these memories now his to draw from, why should they not have a fighting chance at escaping this particular storm intact?
Tomorrow, he would see Potter.
The indispensable piece in the puzzle of the Dark Lord's defeat. The foolish boy who had turned back for him at the last possible moment.
Eleven-year-old Potter — scruffy, underdressed, utterly unaware of what he was about to step into.
"Harry Potter," Draco said quietly, to no one but himself. "Let's start over."