“Can I please join you?” Harry addressed the beautiful platinum blonde in Slytherin uniform sitting alone at the table.

“Potter. It will be my honour”, she bowed lightly and smiled.

“Again, I must apologise for my behaviour. Your… intervention yesterday reminded me that you’re actually a girl”, he started.

She just looked at him with the look of trying to understand if that’s some kind of a joke. “I would expect my physical appearance to leave little room for ambiguity in that regard”, she smiled.

He blushed. “I’m sorry, that sounded incredibly dumb. Of course it’s absolutely obvious that you’re a girl. What I meant was that I thought of you as some kind of a hostile bully figure without emotions or a soul, intent on offending people just for entertainment; someone powerful who oppresses the weak and the defenceless”, he fumbled.

“And you saw yourself as the noble knight, defender of the downtrodden, slayer of the impersonal soulless bullies of all kinds?”, she grinned.

He was obviously uncomfortable. “Unfortunately, that does sound too close”.

“So, we might as well start with the obvious. I am very much a girl. I am a daughter of Narcissa Malfoy, née Black, and Lucius Malfoy. I am thirteen years old. I grew up in the Malfoy Manor, as the only child of my parents, who treated me with utmost love and care my whole life, and I love them with all my heart. I am a pureblood witch, from an unbroken line of pureblood witches and wizards reaching back for untold centuries. You are very much a boy. You are a son of Lily Evans, a very talented muggle-born witch, and James Potter, a pureblood wizard from the ancient pureblood line reaching back to Ignotus Peverell. On the wizard side, your blood line is as ancient and respectable as mine; in fact, it’s all-but-worshipped and wrought into legend. You father was a talented Chaser, also in Gryffindor, and the apple obviously didn’t fall far from the three. Your personal fortune is one of the greatest in the wizarding world, second only to that of Malfoy and Lestrange families. All in all, in the wizarding community you and I are both famous, esteemed and powerful. So, will you please explain how does one of the most powerful, noble, revered, influential and wealthy persons in our world get to consider himself an underdog in the noble fight against a girl of identical social status?”, she smiled with the exquisite charm he never noticed before.

“You really did your homework on me. In fact, you seem to know more about me than I do”, he scratched his ear. “Peverell”?

“They were one of the first great families that went extinct in the male line. This means they only had female children and their family name died out. This fate, unfortunately, awaits my family due to the fact that I’m a girl, and the only child of my parents” She looked almost guilty. “Eventually, their line produced you as the final surviving heir”.

“So you are saying that I am the last heir of the Peverell line, and you are the last heiress of the Malfoy line, and we are some kind of wizarding nobility?” He all but expected her to say that she’s joking.

“Quite so. We don’t actually have nobility in the muggle sense, but you and I would be the equivalent of a duke and a duchess”, she confirmed. “With the difference that there’s no royalty above us”.

“Damn”. He rubbed his forehead. “There goes my claim on the noble underdog status”.

“Welcome to the rarified summit of the oppressor class”, she joked. “We might go hunting foxes one day, to complete the impression”.

“So let me get this straight. You have approached me as an equal because we’re both some kind of wizarding royalty. I treated you horribly because I saw you as some kind of a spoiled princess who treats lower people like second class citizens. You got annoyed because you found that horribly offensive. And you’re really quite nice when I stop growling and sneering at you and talk to you like a normal person”, he smiled.

“Oh, I’m probably quite spoiled. I can’t say you’re wrong. I was isolated in a very narrow social circle and this school environment is quite new for me. I’m still learning the implicit assumptions and expectations of people from different communities and social environments. I keep making blunders, but please don’t ascribe this to malice. I have my background, and you have yours. I would assume you didn’t have it easy either”.

“You are right. I still keep pretending to know what I’m doing, but almost every day there’s something new, and completely unfamiliar, while everybody expects me to know everything”, he shrugged.

“So, how about this. Let’s compare notes, and I promise not to judge you. If you could show me the same courtesy, I would be grateful. We can teach each other. I was born and raised among witches and wizards. You were born and raised among the muggles. I suspect neither of us can fully comprehend what that even means. So, I recommend that we just talk, compare notes, tell the truth, not judge or attack each other, and enjoy each other’s company over pumpkin juice and apple pie. I actually like you very much, or I wouldn’t have been offended by the way you treated me. Trust me, if someone unimportant treated me that way, I wouldn’t even notice. But since you’re important to me, I was furious” She looked at him with that clean, sincere look that was the trademark of her personality.

“I would like that very much. Your yesterday’s stunt made quite an impression on me. The first part was that you are brave, smart, dignified and not to be messed with. The second part is that you are a gentle girl with feelings that can be hurt, and not some generic monster I imagined”, he smiled.

“I do have feelings”, she smiled back. “And they can definitely be hurt. Especially when people assume that the powerful part of me means that I don’t feel the blows. I am well known for crying into my pillow when my feelings are hurt. I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t treat me in ways that would make this a common occurrence”.

“Can we do something that would prevent this? Hurting a girl’s feelings is not something I am proud of.”

“We can learn more about each other, and promise to protect each other’s feelings from harm as if they were our own”, she nodded.

“I would like that. What exactly do you have in mind?”

“For instance, be aware that I never used knowledge about your family to try to score a point. It’s off-limits, because I know it would hurt you, and I don’t want to do that. I assume your parents are sacred to you, the way mine are sacred to me.”

“You are a better person than me, I’m afraid. I did attack your parents on multiple occasions, and if that had you crying into your pillow, I apologise. However, I have a problem here. Your parents are closely connected to Voldemort. If they are actively politically involved in this project, it might be impossible for me to grant them the kind of immunity that I would otherwise gladly give them in order to protect your feelings”.

“This is fair”, she conceded. “Purely political attacks are valid, and if my parents happen to be involved in things you find hurtful or offensive, it is a legitimate target for you. I might still cry into my pillow because of it, but I promise not to take it against you”, she smiled.

“I am really regretting the fact that I missed out on this for two years”, Harry sighed ruefully. “You are just very nice to be with”.

“I’m glad to hear it, and it’s the same on my part”, a brilliant, glowing smile illuminated her face.

“Your hand was cold and sweaty yesterday”, Harry noted. “I took it as proof that you were truly stressed because you honestly thought that I might choose to kill you”.

“You are correct”, she nodded. “I never jest with those things. If I offer you an option to take my life, the option is real. I did, however, put my trust in your gentlemanly decency, hoping it would protect me, as it did in the end”, she smiled. “As for you holding my hand, I in fact enjoyed the experience, because it was the first time you treated me with respect, and I like being treated with respect, rather than being sneered at”, she gave him a lopsided smile.

“I promise to keep treating you with respect. But about that, what can I call you?”

“Please, call me Lyra. You can call me Malfoy if you want to be formal for some reason, but between us, I feel more comfortable being on a first name basis”.

“Call me Harry, then. Potter only if I mess things up, I guess”, he smiled.

“I will keep it in mind”, she smiled back.

“You are such a nice girl. I’m really sorry to have treated you poorly before”, he confessed.

“Thank you. Let’s eat something, I’m starving”, she smiled.

…

“So, how was she?”, Ron was curious.

“Polite. Nice. Sincere. Very open about being hurt by my rudeness. Smart as Hermione, honestly. I had to focus to keep up with her, like I’m in class and it’s a professor speaking. She speaks like they do – complex, large sentences, all of it perfectly thought out. I feel dumb as a brick compared to her. I only had Hermione so far make me feel like I have to actually work to follow her, but Lyra is like that too”, Harry reminisced.

“Blimey”, Ron mumbled. “I half expected she’ll stab you or poison your pumpkin juice”.

“Oh no, it was nothing like that. It felt like talking to a professor who is being very nice, but you need to take remedial lessons because you messed up”, Harry laughed. “She knows more about my family than I do. Also, she sees the world in a completely different way than me, and there seems to be much more to her pureblood pride thing than I suspected. I thought it’s just a hate group like the Skinheads. But they are more like classic nobility with lineages, ancient books, stories and legends.”

“Skin what?”, Ron was confused.

“Skinheads. A muggle thing with thugs shaving their heads and hating foreigners and all kinds of other people”, Hermione sat with them. “I surmise you survived lunch with the enemy?”, she turned to Harry.

“Honestly, she doesn’t feel like an enemy. She feels as smart as the professors, or you”, Harry greeted her, and she slightly squirmed at the compliment. “I’m not completely comfortable with her yet because we hardly know each other, me keeping the distance for two years and all that, but I feel like I missed out. Also, there’s something about her that makes me feel inferior in every way, although it’s not anything she’s doing”.

“She’s not dumbing herself down or making herself smaller for anyone”, Hermione nodded wisely. “You’re not inferior to her. From where I’m standing, you two look very much alike. But while she’s being her full self, you’re being barely more than half, in a normal interaction.”

“What does that even mean?”, Ron wondered.

“It means that she’s honest on a level I have never seen. You’ve seen the stunt with challenging Harry to be done with it and just kill her if he hates her so much. That kind of honesty, courage and straightforwardness. None of us are that brave or honest. We’re all protecting our feelings from hurt, we’re not being direct, hiding behind humour and that stuff. She would openly say things we would be too weak or ashamed of to say out loud. It’s the kind of emotional courage that makes us all feel small and inferior, not just Harry”, she finished, nodding.

“Wait, are you actually impressed? I though she hurt your feelings with her insults?”, Ron scratched his head in confusion.

“I am, and she did. However, I’m objective enough to be able to distance myself from the situation and judge it properly. You saw her yesterday – speaking in complicated, adult language of nobility, with authority that made Professor McGonagall stand at attention and obey her, and raising the stakes so high that she offered her life. Who wouldn’t be impressed?”, Hermione looked at him directly.

“Well, I definitely was. In fact, more ashamed of myself than impressed, but definitely impressed”, Harry added.

“She definitely wants to be friends with you, Harry, and I think it’s because she considers you her social equal. I know, you consider everybody to be your equal, but that’s not how she was raised. She has a very aristocratic view of society and almost nobody is her equal in the hierarchy she was taught, but you seem to be, and she cares very much about your opinion. Don’t think she’d do the yesterday’s stunt if it was someone else”.

“How do you know so much about it and you never even talked to her properly?”, Harry was stunned, because she was right on the money.

“I pay attention, Harry. I have eyes. I was there yesterday”, she rolled her eyes.

“We were all there yesterday, but you’re just wickedly smart”, Ron concluded.