Title: Aunt Andromeda Says
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen for main characters, mention of Lucius/Narcissa, Andromeda/Ted, and James/Lily
Content Notes: AU (Draco is the Boy-Who-Lived), angst
Wordcount: 3600
Rating: PG
Summary: Draco is off for his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His mother is dead and his father is a traitor and people think he's some kind of hero, but Draco trusts in his aunt Andromeda, who raised him, and his cousin Nymphadora, who's his big sister. Everything will be all right.
Author's Notes: A July Celebration fic being written for an anonymous request that asked for A story where Draco is the boy who lived. Maybe raised by Andromeda till he goes to Hogwarts? How was Draco raised and changed en into what child did Harry develop with James and Lily raising him?

Aunt Andromeda Says

"Let's go early to avoid the crowds!"

Well, it would have been good advice, Draco thought as he stared around at all the shoving, screaming witches and wizards, with trolleys and carts and cages and bags and satchels and trunks and odd wheeled things that they almost seemed to be pushing just to push wheeled things. Dora couldn't know that everyone else would have the same idea.

And then they caught sight of him. Draco braced himself.

"Is that him?"

"Draco Malfoy..."

"Do you suppose?"

"He looks just like him."

Draco could guess who they meant with that last reference, and he stiffened his back, offended, even as he shoved through the crowds. He did not look just like his bastard of a father who had let Voldemort into the Manor, and then panicked and run when Mother died in Draco's defense and Draco somehow blasted Voldemort to pieces. He wasn't a traitor. He wasn't a coward.

And he had grey eyes that were just like the Black family's, not like the Malfoys'. Aunt Andromeda said so.

"Yes, he's my nephew, and you will leave him alone," Aunt Andromeda said now, stepping past Draco to aim her wand at a gaping red-haired witch who was coming too close. Her gaggle of children stepped back, except for twins who kept craning their necks, but then Aunt Andromeda and Uncle Ted and Dora and Draco were past them, and Draco didn't have to look at their awed faces anymore.

He giggled a little to himself. He wondered what they would say if they knew that his mother wasn't a heroine of the Light, the way everyone claimed she was. She had saved him with Dark magic that she knew as a result of her upbringing. Aunt Andromeda said so.

"Now." They halted next to the Hogwarts Express, and Aunt Andromeda set her hands on Draco's shoulders and looked sternly into his eyes. "What are you going to do once you get on the train?"

"I'm going to find a compartment and sit by myself unless I can find someone who doesn't ask me about the scar the moment they see it," said Draco obediently. "And if someone who looks like Mr. Crabbe or Mr. Goyle or my father shows up, I'm going to lock the door."

"Good. And what happens if someone comes in, pretends to be friendly, and then asks to see your scar?"

"I'll tell them to leave."

"How?"

"Like this." Draco mimicked the glare that Aunt Andromeda had used on the red-haired witch, and she softened and gently trailed the backs of her fingers over his cheek.

"You look so much like Cissy," she murmured, and then she sighed and went on. "And what happens if someone threatens you or asks invasive questions about the night your mother died?"

"Then I tell them that I prefer not to discuss it, and I know a spell that will make them vomit up everything they've eaten for a week."

Aunt Andromeda turned her head and stared at Dora. "Nymphadora Tonks."

"You told me to teach him useful spells!" Dora protested, and her hair turned the color of fire, the way it always did when she was irritated. "That one's useful."

"But you should have taught him to be subtle with it." Aunt Andromeda narrowed her eyes and acted as if she was going to say something else, but Uncle Ted put his hand on her arm and shook his head. Draco watched in fascination. He had tried to pick up on the silent conversations they had when they did that, but to no avail.

"Be subtle," Aunt Andromeda said, turning to Draco then. "I know you can be. Cissy was."

Draco stood tall and proud. To be compared to his mother meant he had to be good-strong, fast, smart. Worthy of being proud and part of the House of Black. "Yes, Aunt Andromeda."

For a moment, she reached out and clasped him close, and Draco let himself rest against her with a sigh. She smelled like the Dreamless Sleep Potion she'd been brewing that morning. Draco had asked why she needed it, since his aunt usually only had nightmares on Halloween, and she's said, "To sleep well the first few nights that you're at school, of course."

She didn't say the words I love you often. Draco had never needed them.

"Now go." Aunt Andromeda released him with a little push, and Draco turned to Uncle Ted and Dora. Uncle Ted gave him a fierce, hard embrace and murmured something into his ear that Draco could barely understand. Emotion just made his uncle more silent, even as it made his aunt talk more. Draco hugged him back and faced Dora.

She gave him a worried smile, and her hair turned blue. "Be careful, little cousin." When she bent down to hug him, she also talked into his ear, but her words were clearer than his uncle's. "I'm going to send you a book of curses for Halloween. Make sure that you keep it close and use it well."

Draco kept from laughing because that would have told Aunt Andromeda something was wrong. He nodded firmly and said, "I will," which answered both things she said. Dora looked a little relieved when she stepped away again.

Draco hopped on the Hogwarts Express and ran swiftly down the main corridor of the train, checking the compartments all the way. Several had students in them, or at least their trunks. When he reached an empty one, he stepped inside, took his trunk out of his pocket-it returned to normal size immediately-and removed two things. One was the book on Potions that he was going to read on the ride to Hogwarts. The other was the cage that held his enchanted crystal snake. Most of the time, the snake was wrapped around Draco's wrist, but there was too much chance she would animate in front of a Muggle crowd at the train station, the way she always did when she thought Draco was in danger. But in front of wizards, Draco thought as he slid her out of the cage and wrapped her around his wrist again, he could wear her freely.

He called her Echo, after the nymph who was in the legend of the narcissus flower.

"Come on, Echo," Draco said to her in Parseltongue. Aunt Andromeda had also told him to be careful about who he used that language in front of, but he didn't intend to do it when anyone else came into the compartment. "You can help me look at this book and see if we can impress Professor Snape when we get there." Draco had no real doubt that he'd be Sorted into Slytherin, but even if he wasn't, Snape was still going to be his Potions master.

"Wow. You can talk to snakes!"

Draco looked up sharply. He couldn't believe that he'd been so careless as to forget to lock the compartment door. Even Dora would have scolded him for that one.

A boy his own age stood there, in shapeless black robes and what Draco thought was a tattered wig at first, until he realized it was the boy's hair sticking in every direction. His eyes were bright green and fascinated. He had glasses, round ones that Draco liked. He also had a healing bruise on his cheekbone and broken knuckles on his hand.

He saw Draco looking at them and shrugged. "There were some older boys bothering Neville. Neville's a friend of mine."

"And you punched them? What about your wand?"

"What about the Trace? Of course I punched them."

Draco put this aside to consider later. He only knew one Neville among the rumored children his own age. Aunt Andromeda had never allowed them to meet, though, because of the fact that Draco's aunt had tortured Neville's parents into St. Mungo's. There was just no getting past that awkwardness with a woman like Neville's grandmother, apparently. "His last name is Longbottom? What's yours?"

"Yes, and Potter."

Draco slowly sank down in his seat. He hadn't expected someone named Potter to be so friendly. James Potter was the sort that Aunt Andromeda had never tried to introduce him to, either. He was the Head Auror, and very righteous, and he strode about and frowned at people a lot. "James Potter's son?"

"Yes. My name's Harry." Harry studied him and then added, "My mum is Muggleborn. I'm going to go somewhere else if you have a problem with that."

Draco had to smile a little. "I was just thinking that I'd have to leave. Because my name is Draco Malfoy."

"Huh," Harry said, which made no sense. He cocked his head to the side and looked at Draco's forehead for the first time. "Yeah, there's the scar. Well, I don't mind you. I know my father had a grudge against your father, but no one knows where he is, do they?" Then he paused and gave Draco a sidelong glance. "Did he ever climb through your window and take you away for adventures?"

"No. I hate him. My aunt Andromeda Tonks raised me."

"Oh. Too bad."

"Too bad that I hate my father?"

"No, too bad that he never took you away for adventures," Harry explained in that slow, careful tone Draco hated. Aunt Andromeda adopted it when she thought Draco wouldn't understand something. "My godfather does that all the time. I think it's sad that you don't have a life with adventures."

Draco could feel himself turning very red. "You don't think that the way I defeated You-Know-Who was an adventure enough?"

"No. Because you don't remember it, do you?"

"Well-a flash of green light and a scream."

Harry nodded knowledgeably. "It's really memories that are important. They're the only real treasure we have in this world. You spend gold, you get annoyed by ancestral portraits, and jewels are only good to sell, too. But memories remain with you forever."

Draco stared at him. He'd never heard anyone say that before. Aunt Andromeda had always included Draco in discussions of the Malfoy assets and how she thought they should be spent or saved. And she had always insisted that he pay attention to discussions of things like how Galleons converted into Muggle pounds and what jewels would be the most advantageous to sell in shops in Knockturn Alley instead of in the open.

"Are the Potters rich?" Draco assumed they had to be, because they were one of the old families, but Aunt Andromeda had never said.

"Yeah, kind of," Harry said, and grinned. "My dad went out and spent a lot of money when the war ended, and so now we have all these Pensieves full of memories of the parties he threw instead of gold. But we have plenty, and Mum is developing all these charms that people are eager to learn how to cast. She teaches them in return for some gold. And in return for their promise not to use the charms to hurt people, of course." He said that like it was obvious.

Draco blinked. "But you have to hurt some people with magic."

"Oh, I know. I had to fight Death Eaters with my godfather once. He just didn't use any of Mum's charms to do it."

Draco tried to imagine how Aunt Andromeda would react if he was fighting Death Eaters at his age, and retreated from the notion with a shudder. "Why did that happen?"

"Oh, it was one of the adventures when Sirius took me out of the house one night. Some Death Eaters hate him because they think he should have been on their side of the war, because he's a Black, you know. So they came after him when they found him out with me. They thought they could kidnap me and make him do what they wanted that way, you see."

"And it—didn't work out?"

"Two of them ended up in Azkaban that night." Harry grinned, and then he abruptly looked at Draco and winced a little. "Oh. Sorry. I forgot they might have been related to you."

Draco swallowed slowly. "It's just that—no one has ever talked to me about things like that. Aunt Andromeda told me that I'm not to blame for what my father did—"

"You're not."

"But she doesn't talk about things like Aunt Bellatrix being on the other side of the war, or your godfather abandoning our family, much. Only what I absolutely need to know."

"Why?"

Draco hesitated. Aunt Andromeda had never said in so many words why that was the case. But he could say what he believed. "She doesn't want to hurt me and make me think about the horrible things so many of the Black family did."

"Sirius didn't do anything horrible!"

"I mean, I don't think she was really thinking about him. But there are other people who did horrible things. You know that Sirius's brother was a Death Eater?"

Harry relaxed and nodded. "Regulus Black, yeah. Sirius told me about him once. But he says now that he thinks he was desperate before the end. He joined when he was young and he probably didn't know what it was all about." Harry flopped into the seat across from Draco and cocked his head at him. "But you can't blame people and decide that they're evil automatically just because of what their family members did. Look what your father did. But you're not him, and you're not evil."

"You don't think I'm evil even though you heard me speaking Parseltongue?"

"No, that's brilliant." Harry pointed to Echo. "And she's brilliant. What's her name?"

"Echo. Because she was in the legend of Narcissus, and my mother was Narcissa."

Draco wasn't sure why he said that, either. Maybe just because Harry was the first new child of his own age he'd met. Most of the ones Aunt Andromeda thought it right for him to meet were younger than he was, or had been there for so long that Draco couldn't remember a time when they weren't around, like Ernie Macmillan.

"Brilliant!" Harry hopped on his seat. "Well, I know you didn't have adventures, but at least you have Parseltongue and a snake. What was it like living with your aunt?"

Draco told him, slowly. About the estate management lessons, and the explanations of Dark and Light magic, and the way that Aunt Andromeda would say something and Draco would know it was true, and the magic lessons from Dora, and how Uncle Ted would take him for ices in the Muggle world. Harry laughed and made comments and told Draco things he knew about the Muggle world, too, and how he thought estate management lessons were boring and he was glad he'd never had to go through them.

"But aren't you your parents' heir?"

"Oh, yeah. But they're not planning on dying any time soon, so the lessons can wait until later, can't they?"

Draco blinked. "Aunt Andromeda doesn't believe in letting anything wait until later. She says that she thought she had time to reconcile with her sister—my mum—and then my mum died."

Harry's eyes softened. "Oh, yeah, I reckon I can see that." He waited for a second, then added, "Sirius and my dad had an argument when I was a year old or so. I'm not sure what about. They didn't talk for almost two years. But Sirius realized that he really wanted to be part of our family, so he came back and apologized and he's been my godfather ever since."

"He wasn't already your godfather? Most parents don't choose godparents when their sons are three years old."

"Git," Harry said, and the word sounded fond and like he was used to saying it. "I mean he got to act as my godfather. And he started teaching me—" He hesitated.

"I told you about Dora and the magic lessons!"

"I know you did. Well, all right. Sirius started teaching me how to sneak around and not get caught, and some Dark Arts, and ways to put people off that some of the Blacks learn."

"And your parents wouldn't approve of you learning that?" Draco knew that Aunt Andromeda didn't approve of everything Dora taught him, but she knew about it. She could have stopped it if she wanted to. The idea of Harry's parents not knowing the truth seemed strangely thrilling.

"No. They think—well, they think everything should be as straightforward and honest as possible. They don't like Dark Arts. They don't like lying. They don't like sneaking, except when they play pranks. And my dad plays more pranks than my mum. I don't even think my dad's played one in years."

"Huh." Draco wondered for a second if the Potters would think what he and Dora did was sneaking around, but then reminded himself of what Aunt Andromeda had said about James Potter and forced himself to dismiss the notion. "Are they ever going to find out about it?"

"They'll probably find out about it today."

"Huh? Did you leave them a letter telling them about it or something?" Draco was secure in the knowledge that he would never do such a stupid thing.

"No. I mean that I'm probably going to be Sorted into Slytherin, and they won't have much left to guess by then."

"But Potters are always Gryffindors! Aunt Andromeda said so!"

"Not this one. I've learned too much about the Dark, and I've fought next to Sirius, and I've kept too many secrets. It's going to be Slytherin."

Draco reacted without thinking to the dull despair in Harry's voice. He reached out, and Echo slid off his arm and onto Harry's arm. Harry looked at her with bright-eyed wonder instead of leaping and yelping the way Aunt Andromeda had warned him other children would when they found out he was a Parselmouth.

"It's going to be all right," Draco said. "It would be awful if you had to face it all alone, but I'll be there. I'm going to be Slytherin for sure. Aunt Andromeda said it, and she's right about everything—I mean, most things. I can help you write the letter to your parents, if you want. Aunt Andromeda made me learn to write letters to the press and the Malfoy estate managers."

Harry grinned at him. "How did you get Echo? Who enchanted her?"

And that was all they needed to say.

A mixture of traits, young Malfoy, but most of all you have a burning desire to show the world that you are not exactly as you have been painted…

"SLYTHERIN!"

Draco smiled and put the Sorting Hat back on the stool. Then he walked over to the Slytherin table, half of which was clapping and half of which was staring at him with cool curiosity. After all, some of them were the children of Death Eaters and might think that he knew where his father was.

Well, they'll have something else to stare at in a second, Draco thought, and looked back at the Sorting.

Names passed in a blur, although part of Draco's mind was carefully recording them. But the one that mattered was Harry, walking forwards with a jaunty step to his stride and putting the Sorting Hat on as though it was a crown.

Draco, watching closely, saw his lips move for a second, but he couldn't make out what Harry said. Then the Sorting Hat chuckled aloud and announced, "SLYTHERIN!"

More than one of their new Housemates was yelling in outrage. Harry just grinned wider and walked over to sit down at Draco's side. He actually almost sat in Pansy Parkinson's lap before she squeaked in indignation and scooted away. Then he flopped down on the bench and leaned towards Draco.

"Let me know which one of them starts bothering you first," he whispered. "That's the one I'll prank first."

Draco laughed.

That night, Draco and Harry went to the Owlery to send their letters off. It meant sneaking out of the Slytherin common room and up more staircases than Draco had ever seen in his life, but Harry had an Invisibility Cloak, so it didn't matter. Draco had helped Harry write his letter, as promised, and now there was a hint of polish to it that might help the Potters calm down and accept the inevitable.

They watched their owls fly away, Draco's eagle-owl Andronicus and Harry's white Hedwig. "I wasn't going to name her that," Harry muttered, leaning on the windowsill with the breeze ruffling his hair. "Mum said it was morbid, though, so then of course I had to name her that."

"Why's it morbid?"

"Because Hedwig was the patron saint of orphans."

Draco looked at Harry and heard, like the toll of a bell in his head, his Aunt Andromeda's voice speaking. You are going to be good friends, even if his sense of humor is rather offensive sometimes.

"Come on," Draco said, breaking the silence. "It's cold up here. Let's go back home."

Harry's smile flashed like a falling star in the darkness.

And, as she was about most things, Aunt Andromeda turned out to be right.