"This is your suite of rooms, Alde."
"Don't call me Alde," Harry muttered as he stared at the door Malfoy was holding open. Or, Draco, really, he supposed. He'd had to get used to calling the boy by that name because he threatened to tell his parents when Harry didn't. Plus, there were just too many Malfoys around for comfort if he kept trying to call them all by their last name.
Draco rolled his eyes. "You're my little brother. I'll call you whatever I want."
"Oh, then I can call you Firebreath?"
Draco's look of extreme horror was entertaining, but Mrs. Malfoy popped up behind Harry before he could bait Draco into continuing. "Aldebaran, you shouldn't fight with your brother. You don't know how deeply he's longed for you to come home."
Harry snapped his mouth shut. So this was going to be just like the Dursleys', he thought, with a pang he was surprised to feel. His "relative" got away with insulting him and Harry just had to bear it. He supposed he shouldn't have thought things would be different. The Malfoys had magic, but that was the only thing that really made them separate from Petunia and Vernon.
His thoughts went back to Ron and Hermione, who had been horrified and—well, horrified was still Ron's reaction, although Hermione was doing her best to support him. She said Ron would come back at some point and say Harry was still his friend. For now, though, that wasn't true.
Harry wished no one had ever discovered he wasn't Harry Potter.
He silently walked into the bedroom and stared around. It was too big and too bare. The walls were marble, he thought, but why did that matter when they were cold and empty? The windows looked out over a garden that was probably pretty in the summer, but bleak and barren now that it was almost Christmas. Professor Dumbledore hadn't been able to block the Malfoys when they filed for custody, but he had ensured that at least Harry didn't have to visit Malfoy Manor until the winter holiday.
Now, he had no choice.
"Aldebaran? We wanted to know how you would decorate your suites."
Harry sighed and turned to look at Mrs. Malfoy. She kept telling him to call her "Mum," but how could Harry, when half the time she was snapping at him about politeness and manners and posture and the way he ate and his background? He avoided it by just not calling her anything at all. "I don't know. I don't know anything about this."
Mrs. Malfoy frowned a little. "Well, of course this is very different than a Muggle—dwelling." Harry suspected that wasn't the word she'd been about to say. "But how did you decorate your room where you lived?"
Harry couldn't keep himself from tensing up at the question, which he knew she would notice. Still, the Malfoys knew nothing about the Dursleys except that they had been Lily's relatives and had given up custody of him without a protest. Harry would make sure it stayed that way.
"With shelves," Harry said, which was true. He said nothing else, and Mrs. Malfoy stepped into the room and gave Draco a little frown.
Apparently, that meant something Harry had no idea of, because Draco immediately left and shut the door behind him. Mrs. Malfoy sat down on the empty, sheet-less bed, and beckoned Harry towards her. Harry went, trailing a foot in the carpet. It was silver-colored, and so thick that he left a trail like someone crashing through a forest.
"Aldebaran, dear one," Mrs. Malfoy said, and then lifted him into her lap. Harry was so startled that he didn't fight, and then he was sitting there with Mrs. Malfoy's arms around him and her anxious face a few inches from his. "I would give anything to make you more comfortable, to make the kidnapping not have happened, but it did." Her hand smoothed his hair back, the straight, tameable white-blond hair Harry still couldn't get used to. Draco insisted on slicking his back with some potion, but Harry refused. "But how can we help you fit in better if you don't tell us what you're thinking?"
Harry just stared at the floor. Then he said, "Look. I know you love Draco more, because he's been here all along—"
He was going to explain how Draco being allowed to insult him however he liked was making him feel uncomfortable, but Mrs. Malfoy uttered a sharp sound of distress and tightened her arms around him.
"Oh, Aldebaran, not that, never that," she breathed into his ear, while Harry sat frozen, because things like this didn't happen to him. "I can see how you came to the conclusion that—oh, but it's not true. You were always wanted, always loved, always missed. That you came back…it's the greatest piece of good fortune we've ever had. I go to bed smiling every night now. I love you."