"It is the name of a star," Mrs. Malfoy said in a low voice. "And it had never been used before in the Black family, just as no twin sons had been born to my branch of the family in recorded history. You're unique, Aldebaran. That was the only reason I called you that."
"I know," Harry said. "And I appreciate that you wanted to make me unique." The words felt stiff on his lips, but who knew? Maybe the Malfoys would respect them better than they would less formal words. "But…it's just too much. And even my best friend finds it laughable."
"Weasley can—" Draco interrupted in a hostile tone.
"No, even Hermione does, and she's pretty open-minded. Please?"
The Malfoys exchanged glances. Then Mr. Malfoy leaned forwards and said, "I have been thinking along the same lines. Not that the name was too much, but that it was too much for you. You have grown up very differently. We do not want to pay tribute to your kidnappers or the Muggles who raised you, but neither do we want to cause you pain. And you are so different from our Draco. We want to pay tribute to who you are." Mr. Malfoy took a deep breath, as if saying all that had been painful for him. Harry thought it probably had been.
"A compromise is possible," said Mrs. Malfoy. There was a wistful tone in her voice, but Harry forced himself to ignore it. He would probably start worrying about whether he was making everyone happy, and this wasn't the time for that. "What about Henry? That has Harry as a nickname, but we wouldn't have to call you by it all the time. And you could keep Aldebaran as a middle name."
Harry thought about it. He knew that they would never agree to keeping James as his middle name, and he could see why. Harry had his own memories of James Potter, or thoughts about him, but of course the Malfoys would never share them.
"Does it matter that I'd be Henry Malfoy?" Harry asked. Mrs. Malfoy had told him that she had chosen her twins' names for the way they sounded with Malfoy, and he almost thought this might be too simple, or too lower-class, or something.
But Mrs. Malfoy gave him a soft smile. "There was an ancestor of yours, a long time ago, who carried that name, during the Norman invasion," she said. "Well, he was Henri Malfoy, but it amounts to the same thing. Yes, Henry. We love you no matter what you're called, and—and perhaps it's time to let go of the fantasy that things can be exactly the way they were if we just call you Aldebaran. Things are never going to be exactly the way they were. What I want is here, now, with you."
Harry beamed at her. Mrs. Malfoy caught her breath, and Harry realized it was probably the first time he had smiled at her with any meaning behind it since she had found out who he really was.
Who he really was. Harry thought about it as he went back to the pile of presents, at Draco's loud insistence. Maybe who he really was was some kind of combination, the person he used to be and the person he was when he was born and the person he would be going forwards.
And if that was the case, then it really was the best decision for all of them for him to be Henry Malfoy. The compromise, not the perfect thing, but the combination.
He glanced up in time to see Mr. Malfoy nodding in response to something Mrs. Malfoy had said. Maybe, with more time, he could think of them as his parents.
"I removed it from the school," Mr. Malfoy was saying now. "Everything has changed. The—obligations that we thought we had are no longer there. Our family has to come first."
Mrs. Malfoy closed her eyes. Harry had the impression she was enormously relieved, although of course he didn't really know why.
But he would learn why. And it sounded like it was good, whatever "it" was that Mr. Malfoy had taken away from the school.
"I got a bigger book than you!"
Harry turned back to Draco, who was smiling at him with a sharp edge, and opened the package that looked like a half-size broom. It turned out to be exactly that, but it was a Nimbus 2001 that sprang back to full size once the paper was removed.
"I already have one of those," Draco sniffed.
"Yes, but who's going to defeat you as Seeker on one of these?" Harry countered, and laughed when he saw Draco scowl.
Mrs. Malfoy took another picture.
Mr. Malfoy leaned back in his chair and looked content with the world.
Maybe, someday, Harry thought, I will be, too.
….
Harry stared into the mirror and sighed. He had darkened his hair with a spell that he'd deliberately looked up in the library, but he still didn't really look like himself—well, the way he used to look before this all happened. The shape of his face was different, and he had a longer nose.
And there were the grey eyes.
"Henry, what are you doing?"
Harry glanced over his shoulder at Draco, who was leaning in the doorway of Harry's bathroom and staring at him. "Trying to make myself look more like myself."
"But this is the way you look." Draco came up beside him so there were two slightly different faces in the mirror. "You're my twin brother. And I know you're uncomfortable," he continued in a slightly gentler voice, slinging his arm around Harry's shoulders. "But we compromised on your name, so we can compromise on your looks, too, right? And I'll protect you from all the nasty bullies at school."
Harry scowled at him. "You're taking this big brother stuff too seriously for someone who's only three minutes older."
"It's a whole four minutes, Mother says." Draco sniffed. "And look, I'm bigger anyway." He stood on his toes to loom over Harry.
Harry rolled his eyes. He started to say something else, but Draco interrupted. "Are you going to tell us what happened to cause that?"
"Huh? No one cursed me to make me like that, if you mean that. Anyway, until this year you would have been the most likely to curse me like that."
Draco snorted. "No, I didn't mean that. I remember that you were a tiny thing when you showed up at the Feast."
"I was not a tiny thing—"
"So it must have been something that happened before Hogwarts, with them." Draco never referred to the Dursleys by name. Then again, Harry thought, he couldn't remember if he'd told his brother what it was. "What happened?"
Harry folded his arms. He knew what would happen if he told them that it was probably due to the Dursleys withholding food from him. Mrs. Malfoy would fuss over him, and Draco would step up the "big brother" nonsense until it was unbearable. And then Mr. Malfoy would probably go and try to kill the Dursleys or something.
Harry was coming to accept, slowly, that they were his family, but he wasn't going to be responsible for something happening to innocent people. Well, mostly innocent. Well, innocent some of the time, anyway. Well, Dudley at least wasn't the one who didn't give him food, that was Uncle Vernon.
"Heeeenry."
"If you ever want Parkinson to notice you, don't whinge like that in front of her," Harry said, raising his eyebrows.
Draco narrowed his eyes. "You know perfectly well I don't want to date her. And I know perfectly well what you're doing. Deflecting. I want you to tell me what happened with those—Muggles. Tell me."
Harry shook his head. "I don't have to if I don't want to," he added, when he saw Draco opening his mouth again. "Mother said I don't have to." He was always careful to call Mrs. Malfoy Mother in front of Draco, to spare himself the lecture that he'd get otherwise. But he thought of her as Mrs. Malfoy in his head.
Draco opened his mouth, then shut it again, and suddenly gave him a look that was so unhappy Harry blinked. He'd once thought he would never see anything like that on Draco bloody Malfoy's face.
"I'm worried about you," Draco whispered. "I just want to know what happened and help you, Henry."
Harry sighed and thought about saying that that name was part of the problem. He was Henry Malfoy to the Malfoys. He understood why, because someone named Sirius Black he'd never heard of before had talked under Veritaserum about stealing him away from the Malfoys and giving him to his mum and dad—the Potters. They didn't want to call him Harry when it reminded them of the kidnapping.
But Harry thought of himself that way. He would probably always think of himself that way. He appreciated what the Malfoys were trying to do, but it was—weird. Not him.
"Maybe someday I'll feel like telling you," he said, and it wasn't even a lie. Maybe someday he would.
He just didn't think it was likely.