A Potion's "accident" turns Harry into an eight year old. Draco Malfoy begins planning his kidnapping/conversion to the Dark Side. But Harry's a passive-aggressive, revenge-obsessed little bastard. Maybe Draco will wait on that whole Dark Lord thing… Draco's POV. Fourshot. Kinda really AU. Snape is still teaching Potions, for one thing.

Assume I inserted a disclaimer.

Ever since Longbottom's gleeful abandonment of Potions at the end of fifth year, Potter had become Hogwart's official Potions disaster. Draco knew this. Snape knew this. Passing Hufflepuffs knew this. The only people who apparently didn't know this were the OWL testing administrators, who had given Potter the grade he needed to show up that first day of class back in sixth year, the only positive result of which being that it kept the rest of them on their toes.

Though claiming that Potter was a disaster might be undervaluing Draco's part in Potter's general failure at the subject. Draco quietly considered this very valid point as Potter's potion exploded, hitting him full in the face with the greenish-brown sludge that had been the result of a well aimed chameleon tail, courtesy of one Draco Malfoy. It was also courtesy of several well timed ladybug shells earlier in the class, coupled with Potter's inability to evenly shred boomslang skin.

Draco was good enough in this subject to know that the potion would explode, and that it would not be lethal; he wasn't good enough to know that it would result in Potter imploding on himself and sending up an acidic cloud of smoke the colour of rotten cranberries, though he took note of the effect; it could come in handy later.

The result of all of Draco's hard work sat huddled in Potter's place. Too big robes, a shock of black hair, and a fearful expression. Potter held his glasses up with one hand, his robes with the other, and stared around the room with his shoulders hunched, refusing to meet the gazes of his friends and the other students.

Blaise snickered, softly, but it was enough. Draco and the rest of the Slytherins burst into laughter, which caused the little Potter to start and nearly fall off his stool. Snape, who had been vanishing the cranberry coloured smoke with frantic swipes of his wand, turned on Potter now and glared at him. If it wasn't for Granger's reflexes, Potter really would have fallen off his chair then.

"What did you do?" Snape hissed, glaring down at Potter, who cowered away from him.

"I don't know, sir, I'm sorry!" he said, which shut up most of the Slytherins. Potter never apologised to Snape if he could help it. Even Snape leaned back and frowned.

"How old are you?" he demanded, and Potter answered, bewildered.

"Eight, sir."

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Do you know what are you doing in this room?"

Potter stared around, clutching at his glasses. "I'm sorry sir, I'm not sure. Am I in the way?"

There was a flurry of whispering, during which everyone came to the conclusion that Harry Potter was now basically eight years old, did a mental double take, and leaned forward expectantly.

Snape turned on Granger, finally. Draco didn't know why he hadn't questioned her from the start. No matter what age Potter was, Granger was always going to be more competent. "What did he do?"

Granger took a deep breath and looked down at the ruined contents of their cauldron. Draco noted that she was still holding onto little Potter's shoulders, and that little Potter had noticed and was trying to squirm away, to no avail.

"I don't know, sir," she said, in an eerie echo of little Potter's earlier words. "The potion was fine before we added the boomslang skin."

"A de-aging potion should not have removed years from Potter's memory or intellect," Snape snapped, glaring at her. Draco mentally added the colourful disparagement of Potter's intellect (or lack thereof) that he was sure Snape had meant to imply. It was more fun when he was actually able to think up the insult instead of letting it stand as an assumption. That was an area where he and Snape disagreed.

Granger bowed her head as she repeated her ignorance of the situation, holding still more tightly to Potter's shoulders. Draco watched with interest as Potter's forehead furrowed and he renewed his struggle to get away. Was Granger hurting the eight-year-old version of her friend?

But no. Potter looked more confused and upset than hurt, and Granger pulled away with a yelp a second later, staring at Harry and holding her left hand.

Draco smirked. Potter had used a Stinging Hex, from the look of the mark on her hand. Snape ignored Granger's wounded expression and collected the cauldron and the contents of Potter's worktable, before ordering her to take Potter down to the Hospital Wing. Potter went, docile and hunched in on himself as Granger led him away.

"Back to work, all of you," Snape said, glaring at the rest of the class. Weasley, who clearly wanted to follow the other two thirds of his trio, snarled something under his breath and got points taken away.

After that, it was a fairly normal Potions hour.

Apparently, Draco's little prank on Potter had been harder to reverse than he had first assumed. Potter was still eight the next day, and spent the whole morning following Weasley and Granger around school. Draco, curious despite himself, and in the same Charms class as the Gryffindors, followed them out of the Great Hall and took mental notes on Potter's eccentric behaviour.

Or maybe it wasn't eccentric for an eight year old, though Draco wouldn't really know. Potter's mouth was continually hanging open, in a way that Draco's mother would have abhorred. His eyes were wide enough to show white all around his irises, and widened further still as Granger explained about the trick staircase on the second floor.

Pansy, who also had Charms right after breakfast, leaned closer to Draco and whispered, "Potter looks like someone let him into the coffee."

"My mother would have threatened to hex my face to stay that way if I'd wandered around with such an expression when I was that age," Blaise agreed.

"He does look a bit like a stunned lemming, doesn't he?" Draco said, tilting his head and grinning. "Not a terribly significant difference between eight and sixteen, then."

They all snickered, though they lowered the volume a bit when Potter glanced back at them curiously. Draco and his Slytherin friends had no qualms about picking on children. They were, on the other hand, aware that the maturity level expected of them required that they not actually make said children cry.

Charms was entertaining, if only because of Potter. They were learning a variation on the standard cleaning charm, which of course, Draco had no use for. He had almost been tempted to call for a house elf when Flitwick asked for a volunteer from their group, but decided in the end that the detention wasn't worth it. And besides, the blustering from Flitwick would have caused Draco to miss what happened next.

Potter sat quietly for the lecture portion of the class, but when it was time to break into groups to practice, there was a commotion from his side of the room.

"Hermione, where's my wand?" For someone who was trying to be subtle, Weasley was awfully loud. Draco watched with amusement as Potter crawled away from his guardians under the desks, wand held securely in his right fist.

"Where did you last see it?"

While Granger and Weasley searched around for Weasley's wand, little Potter came to a halt under Brown and Patil's desk, glancing at their shapely legs and frowning.

Please do it, Draco thought. He nudged Pansy and indicated Potter's position with his eyes. She pinched her lips together so as not to laugh, and leaned forward for a better view under the pretence of checking Draco's text.

Potter was mouthing the incantation himself, trying to wrap his eight-year-old tongue around the tricky Latin syllables. If there was a god, Weasley and Granger wouldn't realise what Potter had done before it was too late.

Potter raised the wand, pointed it right at Brown's shin, and waved it, just like Flitwick had shown them. Draco was impressed at his attention, and even more impressed at the high-pitched shriek that Brown let loose not a second later.

Potter scurried away under the desks, unnoticed, as Brown leapt to her feet and started swiping at her shins frantically, trying to get rid of all the extra little legs that had started popping up. Draco wasn't close enough to hear what Potter had actually said, but he wished he had been. A spell like that…

Brown continued screeching as Flitwick ran over to assist, but Draco kept an eye on Potter. He had returned to his spot with Weasley and Granger unnoticed, and stuck Weasley's wand under his chair, as though Weasley had just dropped it. He looked mildly disappointed at his failure, but still.

Draco resolved to be around Potter and his friends as often as possible until the potion was reversed.

After Charms ended, Draco came across Weasley and Granger arguing over who should take Potter with them to class. Draco hoped Granger won, seeing as how she was in Arithmancy with him next. Draco stepped back into a corner to watch the argument, unobserved, and began to grin.

Potter's friends were abysmal at childcare. He had wondered during Charms, but it was confirmed now. They were pants at keeping tabs on him. Draco watched little Potter slink away down the corridor toward a statue of an Abraxan and stare up at it in awe. He was well out of Granger and Weasley's sight now, but they hadn't noticed a thing, too caught up in arguing with each other.

Potter got that stunned lemming expression on his face again as the Abraxan glanced down at him, flexing its wings and generally showing off. The statue was one of Draco's favourites, and it adored attention. Potter's gasps of awe as it reared and shook out its mane were well received, by both parties.

Draco glanced away from Potter and observed Granger and Weasley's argument again. They still hadn't noticed Potter's absence. He looked back at Potter, eyes narrowed.

He could walk right up to Potter, stun him, and be gone before they ever noticed. The Malfoys needed something like this, to put them back in the Dark Lord's good graces after Lucius' arrest and the Dark Lord's decision to leave him in Azkaban after releasing the rest of his followers. The Malfoys were not well favoured nowadays, and Draco did not like his mother living alone in the Manor now that the Dark Lord and any number of Death Eaters had moved in with them.

They would be set for life if he could deliver Potter to the Dark Lord, weakened like this. The question was, did he want to?

Before Draco could make up his mind, the argument ended with an abrupt: "Where's Harry?"

Weasley started walking in the direction of Potter and the statue, and Draco made himself scarce, setting off for Arithmancy.

He would think about this.

Over the summer, after the Dark Lord had begun his occupation of Malfoy Manor, he held a revel, to which all the teenaged children of his Death Eaters were invited. Draco hadn't minded going, and knew that there really wasn't any way around it, anyway. It was held in his mother's rose garden.

The Death Eaters formed a circle under the full moon, and the younger generation were instructed to form their own circle, each standing in front of their parents. Several strangers were brought in from a nearby village, bound and naked, and Draco's heart almost stopped when he thought he recognised one of them as a mudblood Ravenclaw girl in the year above him.

He stared at her the whole time, feeling the shock of it freshen each time a spell struck her and she screamed. Hours later, when all four of the strangers were dead, Draco itched to step forward and examine her more closely, but he dared not. The Dark Lord stood among what remained of the bodies and made a speech, his voice ringing and grand in the rising dawn.

The Dark Lord's words would have sent a shiver up Draco's spine no matter what. The difference was, staring down at the girl's lifeless corpse (was her name Sara? He thought it was Sara…), he couldn't tell what kind of shiver it was. Before, he would have said it was one of reverence, of glory. Now, he didn't know.

Nagini, the Dark Lord's snake, ate all four of the bodies while the Death Eaters took turns crawling forward through the blood and organ fragments to kiss the hem of the Dark Lord's robes. Draco watched the girl-whose-name-might-have-been-Sara disappear down the giant snake's bottomless throat, and felt as though he wanted to throw up.

Afterward, Draco and his friends retired to his room, where they sat on his bed in their pyjamas, having abandoned their bloodied robes on the floor for the house elves, and watched the rest of the sunrise. The other progeny had gone home already, or were sleeping elsewhere. None of them spoke for the longest time.

It was Theo who finally broke the silence. "Brookstone," he said. "That's what her name was."

They all stared at him.

"Sara," Pansy said after a long moment, and her face was more lined than Draco had ever seen it. "I thought so too."

Draco nodded, staring down at his knees. Theo put an arm around Daphne's shoulders as she started to shake.

"Maybe it wasn't her," Greg said. His dull features furrowed.

"She tutored me in Herbology once." Vince said.

"I remember that," Theo replied. "You said she had decent tits, for a Mudblood."

There was a longer silence this time as they all looked at each other, thinking the same thing but not daring to say it out loud. Uncertainty was not something prized in the ranks of the Death Eaters. It would have been so much easier if they hadn't known her.

Vince finally spoke up. "She was just a Mudblood, though." The rest of them stared at him. Greg shifted uneasily, and nodded.

"Right, she was. Hardly even matters."

"I…" Pansy's voice broke. She took a deep breath and tried again. "Yes, you're right. Of course. It was just unexpected, that's all."

They all nodded slowly, unable to meet each other's eyes. Theo's arm tightened around Daphne's shoulder, and they all sat, huddled and miserable until breakfast.

Later, during the Sorting, they would rake their eyes over the Ravenclaw table, and her empty chair would silently accuse them all.

"So," Draco said, approaching Pansy and Blaise where they sat in front of the fire. Vince and Greg were hunched over their Transfiguration text in the corner, paying no attention. The common room was nearly empty, and Draco had taken the opportunity when it was given. "Potter."

Pansy raised an eyebrow at him. "Yes, Draco?" she asked. "What about Potter?"

"I was thinking," Draco said. "About the Dark Lord."

They both knew what he meant, even though Blaise and his mother had remained steadfastly neutral in the war so far.

He continued. "Potter would be a huge asset as he is now."

Pansy saw where he was going immediately. "We would basically win it, in one fell swoop," she said, and her face was the kind of neutral that meant she was hiding emotion. "We'd be a lot better off."

Draco nodded.

"Have you talked to Theo or Daphne about this?" she asked.

"No," he said. "I'm not sure what should be done, or when. It's a delicate situation."

Pansy bowed her head in acknowledgement. She and Blaise both knew that Draco's main motivation was to protect his family. The only question for him was the best way of doing so.

Pansy raised her chin and met Draco's eyes directly. "I'll support you," she said, effectively ending the conversation. Blaise nodded his agreement, and they all glanced over to the corner where Vince and Greg sat. More plain language wasn't possible just yet. Draco wanted to trust Vince and Greg, but they were in it for their families just the same as Draco, and the pressure there was intense. Pansy could play the delicate female and demur, offering money instead of her actual services, but Draco just wasn't in the same position.

He wasn't sure why he had expected advice or opinions from this corner, anyway. Draco's friends were cagey at the best of times, and they had a lot to lose here. He would be the one taking sides, and hopefully, they would follow.

Draco came across little Potter a couple days later, bereft of his friends and guardians and playing some incomprehensible game with a portrait. He stopped and watched, wondering where Weasley and Granger were, and thinking about the various spells he could use to bind Potter, and the complexities involved in removing him from the castle (if Draco decided on that route).

Potter caught sight of him before Draco could make up his mind, though, and stared. His glasses were entirely new, Draco noted, and his Hogwarts uniform had been resized to fit him.

"Hello," little Potter said, politely. He clearly had no idea who Draco was. It was... unusual, to say the least.

"Hello," Draco said. "What were you doing with that monk?"

Potter looked back up at the portrait, which shook a fist at him jovially.

"We were playing rock, paper, scissors," Potter said, and waved his palm at the monk, who threw up his hands and marched around in a circle. Potter giggled. Draco did not pretend to understand.

"Where are your guardians?" Draco asked instead. It occurred to him that if he was going to decide to bring Potter to the Dark Lord, he'd have to do it soon. Potter darted a glance up at him.

"I don't have to go home," Potter told him, and stuck his chin out uncertainly. "The Headmaster said so."

Draco blinked, confused at the non sequitur. Potter was so strange sometimes. "No, I meant Weasley and Granger."

Potter's expression was baffled.

"Hermione and ...Ron," Draco said, resolving to brush his teeth after he left Potter. The filthy blood those names implied would surely give him some kind of tooth rot.

In any case, the lines of communication between Draco and the little Potter had been re-established, and Potter's face cleared. "Oh, them. They're in the Tower, I expect."

Draco smirked, and Potter looked at him suspiciously. "Why are you down here then, Potter, if they're up there?"

"How do you know my last name?" Potter asked, his face growing even more suspicious. "Are you a stranger? Aunt Petunia told Dudley not to talk to strangers, so I'm pretty sure they're bad."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "What if I told you I'm not a stranger?" he asked. "We know each other fairly well."

Potter raised an eyebrow right back, and Draco felt mildly plagiarized. "I don't know you," he said. "I know Hermione and Ron and Dumb...the Headmaster, and I know the Git, but I think his name is something else, but Ron won't tell me what it is, and Hermione just laughs when I ask."

Draco nodded. Little Potter was talkative. "The dark, greasy man?" Draco asked, and Potter nodded, watching Draco expectantly. Draco considered what he should say, and, smirking, finally settled on an answer. "His name is Sev."

Just because Potter was a kid and therefore off-limits in terms of teasing, did not mean Draco couldn't fuck with Weasley and Granger, and hopefully make them cry. When Snape found out little Potter was going around calling him 'Sev', he'd have no one to blame but them, and Draco could watch the fallout.

Draco decided then and there that he'd wait to decide about stealing Potter at least until he got to see the look on Snape's face.

"Okay," Potter said, a paragon of unconcern. "Do you know how to get to the kitchens from here?"

"How do you know where the kitchens are?" Draco asked. The expression on Potter's face transformed into that of a patient adult dealing with an incredibly dim child, and Draco was offended. How did little Potter have such versatile facial expressions, while all the regular Potter had was 'insulted', 'annoyed', or 'furious'? At least, that Draco had seen. Potter probably also had 'happy' and 'sad'. The point was, they were very boring, very basic expressions. Little Potter was complicated and interesting.

"I don't know where the kitchens are," little Potter explained. "That's why I asked you."

Draco snorted, but the sound of footsteps cut off the retort he had been about to make. Potter's eyes widened, and in the space of a second, he had disappeared. Draco blinked, staring around the hallway and wondering how he'd managed to vanish so quickly. Then Potter poked his head out of a bit of wall and put his finger to his lips with a devious glint to his eyes, before ducking back through.

When Granger and Weasley came upon Draco, he was grinning. This did not bode well for him.

"He was right here!" Granger snapped, and advanced on Draco, wand at the ready. "What did you do with him, Malfoy?"

"Yeah, you slimy ferret," Weasley said, uselessly. "Where's Harry?"

The smile dropped from Draco's face instantly. "I don't know," he said, his face a picture of innocence.

"Bullshit, Malfoy," Weasley growled. "I saw that fucking smirk you were wearing a second ago. Harry was here. What did you do with him?"

"What makes you think he was here?" Draco asked, frowning. "I certainly didn't see him."

Granger stared at him, then turned around with a huff and marched around the corner. Before Draco had time to wonder where she'd gone so abruptly, she was back, and her entire manner had changed.

"I think Malfoy's telling the truth, Ron," she said. Weasley was unconvinced, and his wand remained fixed on Draco. "Harry's still exactly where he was when we looked, before Malfoy even got here."

Draco immediately began wondering what source of information they had that would tell them when Draco had arrived in the hallway and how long little Potter had been in one place.

"Him and his stupid passages!" Weasley exclaimed, dropping his wand away from Draco and staring around the hallway. "I don't know how he finds them, if even the Mauraders couldn't -"

"Ron, shush!" Granger said, eyeing Draco pointedly. "And anyway, he's an eight-year-old boy who likes exploring and has a lot of time on his hands. Of course he was going to find a few passages."

While Weasley and Granger were debating where the passage could be, Draco began to wonder if Potter was still hiding behind the wall, listening to the whole conversation. He knew he wouldn't have been able to keep himself undiscovered for so long at that age.

There was a crash in the hall perpendicular to the one they were standing in just then, and a childish scream. No, then, to hiding nearby and listening.

"Harry!" Granger cried, and took off running toward the source of the noise, Weasley close on her heels. The moment they rounded the corner and vanished out of sight, little Potter jumped out of the wall and grabbed Draco's hand.

"Hurry, before they find us!" Potter tugged on Draco's hand, and Draco began to follow, amused despite himself. Little Potter was fucking sneaky. It was cute, actually, though Draco would never admit it aloud.

"What was that noise?" Draco asked, allowing Potter to tug him along.

"The knight threw his axe for me," Potter explained with a toothy smile. "And I screamed so they'd know it was me, then I came back."

Draco snickered. "Why weren't you in Slytherin, Potter?" he asked. Potter frowned at him.

"I don't know what you're talking about. Where are the kitchens?"

Just then, Granger rounded the corner, pointing her wand at Draco.

"Let him go!" she cried, then: "Furnunculus!"

"Hey!" Draco yelped, ducking. "I didn't do anything!"

"Stupefy!"

"Fuck!" Draco said in response, fumbling for his wand. He should be more prepared than this when Harry Potter was in the vicinity. Age made no difference; that should have been obvious from the start. No regular two year old had Dark Lords chasing after them. Potter clearly had some kind of curse that attracted danger and headaches to those around him.

He summoned a Shield Charm, and Granger gave up on him, instead running over to little Potter and throwing her arms around him. Potter's plans were dashed, and from the petulant expression on his face, he knew it.

"Are you okay, Harry?" Granger fussed, petting Potter's head and generally causing Potter's face to shift from defeated to uncomfortable.

"I'm fine," he said, trying to pull away. "I was hungry."

"Oh, but we were going to go to the Great Hall, honey," Granger said, and Draco made a face at her behind her back. Potter saw it, and the corners of his mouth lifted up.

"I don't want to eat there, 'Mione," he said. "I don't like it. It makes me scared."

Potter didn't look very scared. He looked like he was bracing himself. And no wonder, too, when Granger threw her arms around him and hugged him again.

"Oh, of course we don't have to go, then, Harry! I didn't know you were afraid of the Hall, or we would never have made you go in there. Oh, you poor darling..."

"I want to go to the kitchens," Potter said, and his voice sounded pathetic. Draco saw what Granger couldn't, though, and knew that Potter's face was unemotional, even bored, and that he was clearly lying. In deference to this new, crafty little Potter, Draco stayed silent, knowing that his snickering would spoil the plan Potter was working on. A Slytherin never sabotages another Slytherin, after all, unless absolutely necessary.

And little Potter was such a Slytherin it almost hurt, to remember what his sixteen year old self was like. It was astronomically unfair, knowing that whatever had happened to Potter between eight and eleven had changed him so drastically that he had rejected Draco's friendship and been sorted into Gryffindor, when this eight-year-old never would have.

Weasley came barrelling around the corner again, red with exertion and sucking in gasping breaths.

"Did you - Hermione, you found him!" he stumbled over to Granger and knelt down where she had been hugging Potter, to pat him on the shoulder.

"We almost lost you again," he said, through his panting. Potter smiled up at him.

""Mione says we can go to the kitchens for dinner tonight," he said. As Weasley agreed and stood, he glanced over at Draco.

"What are you still doing here, ferret?" he snarled. Draco was about to spit out a reply when he saw the fleeting expression of disapproval on Potter's face, directed at Weasley. Instead of reacting, Draco turned away and left.

Only once he'd gotten close enough to Slytherin to be sure he wouldn't run into them again did he let himself laugh. It was more of a cackle, really. The pure irony of the situation was astonishing. Little Potter was bloody brilliant.

Plans to capture him for the Dark Lord were shelved, for the time being, while Draco considered new and fun ways to prank Weasley and Granger through what he was sure was now a new ally: little Potter.

Over the next week, Potter turned out to be more fun than Draco could have imagined. He'd never pictured himself as someone who would like kids, but clearly he got along with at least the sneaky eight-year-old demographic.

Potter hadn't had very much difficulty wrapping Granger and Weasley around his little finger, and had learned quickly the buttons to push to get exactly what he wanted. They disapproved wholeheartedly of how he had taken a shine to Draco, but despite the many and dire warnings, some of which were spoken right in front of Draco (in order to more accurately point out his faults, if Draco estimated correctly), little Potter continued to seek Draco out.

Draco knew Weasley and Granger's warnings were perfectly valid, though he of course said nothing to little Potter about it when they crossed paths. There was still the temptation, clear in his mind, to just take Potter and bring him back to the Manor. At this point, the kid might even go willingly. And with Potter acting as Slytherin as he was, the Dark Lord might not even want to kill him immediately. Draco had heard rumours that the Dark Lord had tried to convert Potter before, and that he had refused. Maybe he wouldn't, at this age. And then Draco would be credited with bringing the Boy-Who-Lived over to the dark side, and his mother would be out of harm's way, or at least she would have a lot more power in the Death Eater ranks than she did now.

In any case, Potter's new and improved personality made it a lot easier to convince the more recalcitrant Slytherins to keep their mouths shut while Draco worked on possibly converting or kidnapping Potter. Conversion was something a group could take credit for, after all, and kidnapping the kid right under Dumbledore's nose was extremely risky.

But the thought stuck. Draco never really got much of a chance to act on it, though, because Granger and Weasley were much more careful about little Potter's whereabouts after that first interaction. Weasley was also quick to show up wherever Draco was and make dire threats when he couldn't find the kid.

"It's nice of you to check in with me," Draco said on one of these times. "But I really don't need to know exactly how inept you and Granger are at child care." And then, because he was only human: "Just because your mother had so many children she never noticed when one went missing doesn't mean you can be as negligent, Weasel. People will be upset if you kill their hero with incompetence."

That was when Weasley threw a hex and got detention, because while Draco had said his bit quietly enough to avoid the notice of any nearby professors, Weasley had not, and McGonagall could actually be fair sometimes.

When he did get the chance to actually talk with little Potter, Draco gleaned quite a lot from their conversations. For example, Potter had not known a thing about magic before his arrival at Hogwarts. As far as he was concerned, he'd been living with his relatives and doing something called 'vacuuming' before he was transposed into the Hogwarts Potions classroom.

His wide-eyed bewilderment when he'd first been changed made sense now, in light of this. His relatives had kept everything a secret from him, and even now, Potter's friends were keeping the fact that he wasn't really eight years old a secret. He thought he'd simply been spirited away from his hated relatives to this new home; he thought some wish he'd made had been granted by magic.

It was kind of pitiful, when Draco really thought about it.