[one-shots]: Pantheon, PG, 1/2
Title: Pantheon
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, Harry/Ginny, Draco/Astoria
Rating: PG
Warnings: Profanity, mentions of sex, angst and depression. Epilogue-compliant.
Wordcount: ~19,000
Summary: Draco has retreated into the Manor and shut himself up with the Malfoy family portraits and memoirs. These are his pantheon, the pattern he lives his life by. It will take his son and an unexpected friendship to change his worship.
Author’s Notes: This is a very quiet story, and Harry and Draco don’t have a full slash relationship as such. More of a Draco character study than anything else.
Pantheon
Draco knew his marriage was the most important decision he would ever make. This was his chance to contribute to the future of the family, his chance to produce the Malfoy heir who would go shining into the future. So he reviewed all the appropriate candidates very carefully.
He needed a beautiful bride. Beauty was the Malfoy inheritance as much as wealth and power were. So he could reject those, like Millicent Bulstrode, who might pass bulging eyes or a pug nose down to his child.
He needed someone with at least moderate wealth of her own. Nothing could prevent a Malfoy from marrying beneath himself in that respect, because they were so much richer than so many other pure-blood families, but there were those who were slight steps down and those were a tumble into the tarpit. Pansy Parkinson and the Greengrass girls, as well as several others, were on the acceptable level.
He needed a powerful wife. She could have political contacts, or intelligence, or quickness with her wand, or, ideally, all three. Draco could supply whatever she lacked, but he didn’t want to take the chance of too little being passed down to his child any more than he did with ugliness.
When those necessary preconditions came together in his mind, the choice was obvious. Astoria Greengrass was demure, poised, graceful, and more intelligent than her sister. She had pale blue eyes that Draco might have found watery in other circumstances, but they reminded him of his mother’s during the ball when they danced together for the second time and she lifted them to his face in the light of the candles.
Her skin was pale. Her hair was blonde-not necessary in the way the other characteristics were, but Draco had to admit he would prefer a blond child. She had a light, quick step that Draco learned to identify with no more than a single second’s forewarning. She had a small sense of humor and good skill with a wand.
She was the one. Draco offered for her, half-confident that he would be accepted, half-remembering that there were others searching for pure-blood women that spring, six years after Hogwarts, and that Astoria had her choice. If he couldn’t have her, he would offer for Daphne, who was not as poised as he would have liked but had plenty of intelligence behind her sharp tongue.
Astoria laid his fears to rest by accepting him. Her family might have been a problem, but they were the right kind of people, the ones who still appreciated the eternal verities-power, beauty, wealth-rather than the political fashion of the moment, which was to treat the Malfoys as outcasts. They nodded and smiled and expressed grave approval when Draco came to tell them what he and Astoria had decided.
They were married in a meadow on a summer morning, the sun soft and pale behind faint grey clouds, the breeze so gentle against their skin Draco could hardly feel it. They made their promises to each other with clasped hands and assessing sideways glances.
Draco remembered thinking it was a perfect moment, the weather as distant and polite to them as they were to each other, and the sky the color of his father’s eyes.
Dead in Azkaban, his father was, dead three months gone.
*
Astoria was pregnant a year after the marriage, and she carried the child as gracefully as she did everything else, with only a slightly paler face in the mornings after she was sick. Draco had never had to witness her vomiting, which he was grateful for. It was hard to imagine the Malfoys whose faces were pictured in the portraits that hung on his walls vomiting.
His ancestors had become his gods, by then.
His father was dead, and with his mother in exile, mourning in silence, Draco couldn’t discuss the past of his family with anyone. There was Astoria, and him. There would be the child. In the meantime, Draco stared at portraits and read histories and looked at tapestries of the family tree so that he might embody the Malfoys in himself.
There was Septimus Malfoy, who had let Muggles burn him to death rather than give up the location of his wife and sons. His face was strong and cold in his portrait, Draco thought. Stoic. He used his finger to trace the edge of Septimus’s cheek, and watched the man turn his head to stare at him. After a moment, he gave a stiff nod of approval.
Most Malfoys were blond, the way Draco was and the child would be, but black hair existed in a few members of the line, such as Helena Malfoy, who had married Frederic Parkinson. She was a tall woman, pictured with a small hunting dragon of the kind that had since gone extinct curled at her feet. She had black hair that cast blue shadows onto her pale skin and a cruel smile.
When she wanted to be alone, the dragon would breathe out smoke that filled the picture and blocked her from Draco’s sight. Draco had to admit it was an original method to get her way, more ingenious than simply moving to another portrait.
It took Draco months to earn her trust and entice her to converse with him, but when she did, Helena had worthwhile things to say.
“There have always been Malfoys who had to be guided,” she told him, sitting on the edge of the rich green chair in her library. The hunting dragon was asleep, its scales gleaming like jade. Helena glanced down at it and smiled, the smile of long companionship that Draco hoped he would eventually share with his wife. “My brother, for instance. Catullus was incapable of controlling a family by himself. He needed my advice, and our mother’s advice, but she died when we were twelve, and Catullus almost drove the family to ruin.”
Draco nodded. He had read the histories, but there was nothing like hearing history from the lips of one who had lived it. “What happened?” He already knew that Catullus and Helena had been twins, and Helena should have held the Malfoy lands and fortune and manor in her capable hands, but she had been several minutes younger than her brother.
Helena snorted softly. “He spent a lot of the family money on what the breeders swore were purebred Abraxans, when they looked to me like Muggle horses with stubby wings. I made him sell half of them and offer the others as broodmares for experimental breeders who wanted some Abraxan blood and didn’t care where they got it. He was sulky and thought he could order me to marry Frederic as a punishment.” She lifted her head, and the dragon woke and echoed her with an arch of its long neck. “What he didn’t understand was that I was glad to go. My home was bitter to me, after so many failures.”
“I wish I could be as great as you were,” Draco muttered.
Helena didn’t smile at him, but she gave him a single look from dark blue eyes and nodded once, a greater gift. “You will be,” she said.
And there were others, heroes and traitors, Muggle-hunters and great Ministry politicians. Draco wandered among them as Astoria grew rounder and rounder, and fell more and more in love with his own heritage.
*
They wouldn’t let him have the baby immediately, but when Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy was wiped free of blood and the liquid of the womb and laid safely in his cot, with Astoria sleeping exhausted in the bed nearby, Draco picked up his son and carried him into the Hall of the Ancestors, where the portraits of Helena and the others hung.
He carried the baby from picture to picture, letting the inhabitants of the portraits see him. Most of them exclaimed softly in admiration. A few turned away, but they were sullen people, or proud ones, who thought it was beneath their dignity to exclaim over a child, no matter how close he might be to them in blood. Helena nodded judiciously and stroked the neck of her hunting dragon so it wouldn’t get jealous when she wanted a longer look.
“That child has a look of my brother about him,” she said. “May he be smarter!”
“I’ll make sure that he is,” Draco vowed, cradling Scorpius against his chest. He made a small, sleepy movement with one foot, stretching it and extending the toes like a monkey. Draco considered the flushed, red look of his legs and had to admit that Helena’s eyesight was better than his. Draco couldn’t tell who among the ancestors he would look like yet. “His name is Scorpius Hyperion.”
Helena smiled a bit. “Continuing the naming tradition of your mother’s family? Well, there’s nothing wrong with either name. Liable to get him teased a bit in school, but that often happens with old family names.”
“It happened to me,” Draco said, memory returning in a flood of overwhelming bitterness. “My first day on the Hogwarts Express. A Weasley snickered at the mention of my name when I was trying to make friends with Harry Potter.”
“Harry Potter.” Helena linked her hands together behind her head. “Would that be the son of Charlus? Or the boy that Lucius used to pace up and down the hall ranting about?”
“It must have been the boy my father ranted about,” Draco said quietly. Had Lucius done that? Draco hadn’t known it. There were always more facts to be collected about his ancestors, it seemed, and carefully stored away, even the ancestors he was convinced he already understood. “Harry Potter’s father was named James. But he married a Mudblood.”
“That’s too bad,” Helena said. “There was real power in the Potter family, at one time, and a few of us did marry them, though I don’t think there were any recent intermarriages.”
Scorpius stretched against him. Draco held him closer still, checked the time to be sure that Astoria and the Healer wouldn’t wake and worry about where the boy had gone, and then shook his head. “No. I’ve read the records very carefully. No marriages more recent than 1692, and that one was a failure, without children.” He looked down at his son. “At least no one can say that I haven’t done my duty to the family now.”
“Is that all you ever think about?” Helena asked, and she sounded sad for some reason. “Doing your duty?”
“No,” Draco answered, looking up again. “I take pleasure in contemplating the history of the family, too.”
Helena sighed, but wouldn’t explain what she meant despite repeated questioning, and eventually Draco carried Scorpius back to the bedroom and put him in his cot. He stood there until dawn gazing down at his son, seeing in him his mother’s eyes, his father’s jaw, his grandfather’s eyebrows, and many other transient, fleeting features that were as yet unexplained.
Whatever he became, though, it comforted Draco to know that he would always be a Malfoy.
*
“Daddy!”
Draco turned his head, startled. Scorpius had never come into the Hall of the Ancestors unless Draco brought him, and it was especially inconvenient for him to turn up now, when Draco was arranging a new shelf of history books under the portraits that would be easily upset by small fingers.
But here he was now, a three-year-old with his thumb in his mouth, clutching the door and swaying back and forth as if he had come a long way. He still had some weakness in his legs, Draco thought, the result of his mother carrying him around all the time, and then the house-elves doing it, when he was younger. Scorpius hadn’t wanted to learn to walk, and he might have waited much longer if not for Draco’s insistence that his son not be a weakling.
Draco forced a smile. “Are you all right, Scorpius? Where’s your mother?”
“Mummy is sleeping,” Scorpius said. His words were usually grown-up, except that he insisted on addressing his parents by childish titles. Draco didn’t know why. He had called his parents “Father” and “Mother” by Scorpius’s age. Scorpius wandered further into the room, staring up at the portraits and looking enchanted when the mastiff pictured with old Tertius Malfoy-arrested for murder in his ninetieth year-growled down at him. “What is this place, Daddy?”
“The place where the history of your family resides,” Draco said, softening a little in spite of himself. It was true that Scorpius hadn’t come here often, that Draco had more and more made the room a private sanctuary in the past few years. But that was wrong; that was robbing his son of his heritage. “Would you like to learn more about them, Scorpius?”
Scorpius nodded eagerly, and Draco picked him up and carried him from painting to painting, as he had when he was younger. This time, though, he wasn’t introducing his child, the future, to the people who had lived before him and wanted to see the continuation of their blood. He was introducing his future to his past. He had never fulfilled any of the Malfoy ambitions; he had never done anything remarkable himself, except become a chronicler of the famous deeds of others. He hoped that Scorpius would do better.
“Who’s that?” Scorpius pointed at Tertius, who turned his head away and sneered. He didn’t have much use for anyone younger than fifty, Draco knew, and treated even Draco with a cold courtesy, though he did appreciate Draco polishing his portrait frame.
Draco told him the name, in the kind of heavy tone that Scorpius appeared to respect, and what he had done.
Scorpius didn’t really understand death yet, which probably counted for the way he wrinkled his nose. “That’s not good,” he said. “That’s not impressive.”
Tertius turned his head for one more cold glare, and then once again looked away. Scorpius, who hadn’t cared about the mastiff’s growl or the puffs of smoke that Helena’s dragon blew at him, started to cry about the glare for some reason. Draco tried to soothe him, but Scorpius’s tears got louder, and Draco finally took him to the door, where Astoria was waiting with open arms.
“What happened?” Astoria asked, looking over Draco’s shoulder as though she expected Draco to have a blade he’d threatened Scorpius’s life with. She really did treat him as if he were an interloper sometimes, Draco thought absently, as if he wasn’t Scorpius’s father and as concerned with the boy’s health as any of them.
“One of the portraits gave him an evil look,” Draco said. “He’ll handle it better when he’d older.”
For some reason, Astoria’s mouth crimped with bitterness. “Do you think he’ll be like you?” she asked. “Holing himself up with pictures and books, masticating the former greatness of the Malfoys over and over?”
“Of course not,” Draco said, considerably startled. “I hope that he’ll make the greatness present, and continue it.”
Astoria left without a word, back as straight as though she was angry about something. Draco shut the door and returned to working on his books.
*
“Why don’t you go outside more often, Daddy?”
Draco sighed. He was trying to teach his son history and genealogy whenever Scorpius didn’t have lessons with Astoria or Daphne, Astoria’s sister, who was his tutor. Lucius had taught Draco to read using the family records, and Draco wanted to experience the same tradition with his son. But Scorpius, while he sometimes paid attention, seemed to lose his place more often than not and ask irrelevant questions. Draco was sure that he had had a longer attention span at four.
“I don’t know what you mean, Scorpius.” He spoke firmly, to recall his son’s wandering focus from the enchanted windows in the Hall of the Ancestors that looked out, or seemed to, on the gardens and the walls. “Come back here, please, and see if you can read this sentence for me.”
Scorpius came back, though he kicked at the carpet when he walked. Draco felt his lips tighten. He would have to speak to Astoria again about speaking to Scorpius, or at least set house-elf minders on him. It wouldn’t do for Scorpius to go around kicking at the carpets when he was the master of Malfoy Manor. That was the best way to ruin them, and some of them, thanks to Preservation Charms, were hundreds of years old, woven from the hair of animals that no longer existed.
“I want to read something interesting,” said Draco’s puzzling son, sitting down next to him and subjecting him to a bright stare. Scorpius’s eyes were grey, but a paler grey than Lucius’s, closer to the blazing blue Draco remembered when his mother was angry. “Tell me about Harry Potter.”
Draco let his son see his mouth tightening this time. “That’s a silly, childish story,” he said repressively. “You need to read something that actually matters.”
“Everyone else thinks it’s interesting,” said Scorpius stubbornly. “Mummy thinks it’s interesting. The elves think it’s interesting. They whisper and cry about it. Auntie tells me how Harry Potter saved us all.”
Draco would have to ask Astoria to have a talk with Daphne, too. “Harry Potter was just a boy,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing, Scorpius. He didn’t mean to save people. He just rushed into the gap and was there in the right place, at the right time. That doesn’t make him a hero.”
Scorpius leaned forwards, staring in fascination for some reason, though Draco was sure he’d spoken in the sternest voice possible. “Why didn’t you like him, Daddy?”
“He was a spoiled brat,” Draco said, stressing the words and glaring at Scorpius. Pansy’s little boy, Horace, would have taken the hint, but Scorpius looked back with innocent blue eyes and thought nothing of the reprimand, so Draco had to answer the question. “He ran around breaking the rules and blaming other people. He thought he was so much better than Slytherins just because he was in Gryffindor.”
“I’d like to be in Gryffindor,” Scorpius said.
Draco sprang to his feet-he’d been sitting on the floor because he thought he should be more on Scorpius’s level when he was teaching him-and reached out, then caught himself and folded his hands behind his back. He would not shake Scorpius. He would never be violent with his child. “Don’t say that again,” he said coldly.
Scorpius grinned at him, eyes shining with childish mischief that Draco knew he had never possessed. “Gryffindor, Gryffindor, Gryffindor,” he sang, softly and tauntingly, so like a boy in Draco’s memories that he might actually have thought Astoria had cheated on him if Scorpius had black hair or green eyes.
About to snap something else, Draco stopped himself. What was he doing, losing his temper like this? Lady Cynthiana Malfoy had put up with more extreme provocation and still been so cold and still that her enemies had been ashamed and negotiated a truce with her that left the Manor standing.
He turned his back and folded his hands in front of him. “That’s enough of the lesson for today,” he said. “Leave me.”
More than the implied threat, it seemed, more than his yelling, that made Scorpius cry. Draco heard him run of the room, and winced as he slammed the door. Then he turned and went to pick up the history books.
“Children don’t like to learn from statues,” Helena told his back. “You can’t blame them for being excited when they came to life, no matter how briefly.”
Again, as she had often done before, she refused to explain what she’d meant, but gave him a look of pity. When he tried to shout at her, the hunting dragon breathed smoke out, clouding the portrait.
*
“Father.”
Draco lifted his head and smiled at his son. With the coming of his fifth year, Scorpius had learned correct address, and stood with his shoulders straight and his head held up like a Malfoy. When he came into the Hall of Ancestors, he spoke quietly and respectfully, as he had done now. “Yes, son?”
“Mother says that I can’t start flying until I go to Hogwarts.” Scorpius’s eyes were enormous, and there was a plea in them that Draco didn’t understand until he thought about the full meaning of his son’s words. Scorpius was probably hoping that Draco would intervene on his side in the dispute with Astoria. “Is that true? It’s not true, is it? I can go flying now? You learned when you were my age.”
Draco hesitated. On the one hand, it was true that every Malfoy should get flying expertise young. One of the ways that Scorpius might bring glory to their family was by being a wonderful Quidditch player.
On the other hand, Draco didn’t think that he ought to contradict Astoria if she was speaking on the grounds of safety. She spent more time with Scorpius and knew him better. Draco had to see him as a symbol.
“Father?”
Draco acknowledged quietly that there was another reason he was reluctant to venture beyond the Hall of the Ancestors. He hadn’t done anything as trivial as playing Quidditch in a long time, and if he failed in front of his son, he would shame them both, not to mention the Malfoys in general. Draco knew he was a long way from perfect, and Scorpius needed a better model than he was.
But the only other models who could really have taught him how to be a Malfoy were dead or living elsewhere. Astoria had only married into the family; she hadn’t taught herself to be more than demure and composed. The spark of greatness was missing from her, and so she couldn’t show it to Scorpius.
In his more troubled moments, Draco would wonder if that meant Scorpius was doomed never to be great, either. Would he take after both sides of his heritage, or only his father, or only his mother? Draco sometimes wondered whether he should have chosen a wife other than Astoria.
On the other hand, that meant Scorpius would never have been born. And Draco loved his son, as difficult as that could be to show sometimes.
“Father.”
Scorpius was staring at the floor now. And something in Draco, something that didn’t fear his ancestors’ disapproval quite as much as the rest, roused in him, and he stood up and went over to take his son’s hand.
“Come,” he said. “I’ll teach you the proper seat on a broom and how to resist the wind. That way, you’ll represent us well when you go to Hogwarts.”
Scorpius gave him an almost worshipful glance, which made Draco smile back even as he mentally disapproved. Scorpius shouldn’t look up to him so much, a flawed scion of the family. He would become more than that. Draco made a mental note to give him not only the histories of the Malfoys but the histories of great inventors and generals and Ministers from other families, too. He would have to blend qualities of all of them if he was to become the most famous wizard in a hundred generations.
That was the ambition Draco had for his son, though he had never voiced it aloud to himself before.
But he had to admit, the thought seemed unimportant beside Scorpius’s laughter when he had the broom hovering, and when Draco sat behind him and showed him how to fly, Scorpius laughed again and bounced up and down on the stick, and Draco tightened his arms around him not from fear of the danger but simply because he wanted to hold on to the moment.
It was completely worth it to be faced with Astoria’s pursed lips and shaking head later in the day.
And it was completely worth even the memories of Potter that flying stirred up and sent racing around his head.
*
“And that was how Harry Potter saved us all.”
That sentence was the only one Draco heard, but he could guess at the rest of the story. Slowly, he turned and marched towards the door of the room the voice had come from. He had to venture outside the Hall of the Ancestors at some point, but he didn’t like to do it often, and this was the major reason why. He always found a source of disappointment in the world other people called “real.”
He stood in the doorway and stared at Astoria, who sat in a rocking chair. Scorpius, six years old now, sat at her feet and stared up at her with bright eyes. His hand traveled restlessly back and forth along the carpet.
“Is that all?” he asked. “Is that really all? Didn’t he have any more adventures?”
Astoria smiled tenderly down at Scorpius, a smile that Draco couldn’t remember her ever giving him. Neither of them had seen him as yet. “He had other adventures, but ones that won’t do for you yet, not at your age,” she said, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head.
At least she has that much discretion. Draco had no wish to have his son learn about Potter’s disgusting success as an Auror or his fertile wedding with the Weasley bitch. He cleared his throat ostentatiously.
Scorpius looked up, his eyes wide. Astoria’s eyes were wider. She understood the meaning of the anger on his face, even if Scorpius didn’t.
“I think you should remember what was lost in that war,” Draco said, in the low voice he knew terrified his wife. “Names. Lives. Reputations. It’s not a shiny, happy tale fit for a child.”
“I know about the losses,” Scorpius said, as if he really did. “But I wanted Mum to tell me about Harry Potter. And she did.” He rose to his feet, clinging to the chair and watching Draco with an oddly defiant expression. “So you can’t be angry at her. Be angry at me.”
“Scorpius, be still,” Astoria said. She stood up, too, and rested her hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Go to bed.”
“But-” Scorpius looked up at her, and then the words died. He hunched his shoulders and plodded past Draco. Draco watched him go and thought about disciplining him further, but he had to exchange words with his wife, not his son. Scorpius would learn of his displeasure later, when Draco could be more diplomatic about it.
They both waited until they could hear the sound of a door shutting, which would be the door to Scorpius’s bedroom. Draco turned to deliver his lecture, only to find that Astoria had attacked first, which was entirely uncharacteristic of her.
“You spend all your days in the past,” she said, her eyes bright enough that they lost all resemblance to eyes Draco had loved and known. “You don’t know anything about the future, about the man our son is growing up to be. In fact, you’ll probably be disappointed that he’s not a proper Malfoy, whatever that is. He loves you and wants you with him, and you give him history books to read. You’re impossible, Draco. Can’t you see that the house and your life are decaying around you?”
Draco had intended to argue. He really had.
But what she said threw him back on his loss, the grief that pulsed under the surface and made every breath he drew a struggle sometimes. If it hadn’t been for the books to tend and read, the artifacts to clean, the portraits who expected his company, Draco would have lain in bed some days and stared at the ceiling. What else was there to do?
Accusations. Proof that he wasn’t good enough. That was all he would ever get if he emerged into the world.
“Just don’t tell him stories about Harry Potter again,” Draco said, and turned away, leaving Astoria with her mouth open.
The Hall of the Ancestors shone with comforting, welcoming light. Draco had paid handsomely for expensive covered torches that would burn bright but not provide open flames that could damage his heritage. He had installed them himself, since he didn’t want anyone without Malfoy blood in this room. He shut the door behind him.
*
“There’s someone here to see you, Father.”
Draco put aside the book he was reading and frowned at Scorpius, who stood next to Great-Uncle Tiberius’s portrait. Tiberius Malfoy had been a daring and inventive duelist who had died in one of his duels before his thirtieth birthday, but that was no reason not to put up a memorial to him. “What do you mean? Why are you announcing it to me, and not one of the house-elves?”
Scorpius stared at him without answering. He was seven now, and ever since he had started going to wizarding primary school, Draco thought something had changed in him. He was more thoughtful, slower to answer back, but also slower to obey.
“You’ll see,” Scorpius said, and then turned and walked out of the Hall of the Ancestors. Draco had to sigh and follow, since if Scorpius was lying they would have to have another talk about obedience, and if he wasn’t, this might be an important visitor from the Ministry who needed to be placated or bribed.
Harry Potter stood in the drawing room.
Draco halted in the doorway, physically incapable of going further. Potter had his back to Draco as he examined one of the shelves on the wall, but there was no mistaking him. Not that wild dark hair, that shaggy way he wore his cloak and his scarlet Auror robes, or that unbalanced stance of his, more suited to a Quidditch broom than the ground.
“Here he is,” Scorpius said loudly. It was impossible to be sure which of them he was addressing.
Potter turned around.
Those green eyes hit him like a blow. Draco winced, and hoped he covered it by moving to the side and indifferently nodding to Potter. “What have you come to ask me?” he said. “As far as I know, Mother hasn’t come back into the country since the Ministry exiled her, and your lot have already looked for Dark artifacts in every conceivable corner of the Manor.” No need to feign the bitterness in his voice then, not when those searches had torn the Manor apart.
“Father!” Scorpius hissed.
Potter, surprisingly, smiled, and then moved forwards, holding his hand out. “No need for insults,” he said. “I’m not here on Ministry business. I’m here because my sons will start attending the same primary school as your son does soon, and I wanted to ask a few questions and notify you that they’d be here.”
Draco kept his arms folded and didn’t reach out to take Potter’s hand. It would be wrong. He had abandoned his own past, letting it be absorbed into the past of his family. He was a failure, not someone who could add to the Malfoy greatness. “You should speak to my wife,” he said. “She’s the one who arranged for Scorpius to attend that particular school and knows everything about it.”
Potter lowered his hand and stared hard at him. Draco glared back. He hoped that Potter couldn’t hear how hard his heart was pounding, or see how hard it was for him to keep standing there instead of bolting away.
It wasn’t…
He couldn’t turn back in time like that. For all the time he spent among portraits and history books, he knew that he couldn’t stop things from changing. The problem was, he had mucked everything up when he had tried to act on his own behalf. The last important act he would ever commit was begetting Scorpius. He had done that now, and so done his duty. Now he could stay silent while Scorpius went out into the world and added another name to the pantheon of Draco’s dreams.
“I’ll speak with her, then.” Potter’s voice was clipped, and his eyes cold. Draco was glad to see it. Rudeness, coldness, couldn’t set fire to dreams and regrets that he should have outgrown long ago. “Where is she?”
“I have no idea,” Draco said, and then turned his head to look at his son. “I imagine Scorpius can take you to her.”
Scorpius stood there with his hands in fists at his sides, eyes wide and hurt. Betrayed.
Draco looked down. Scorpius, Potter, Astoria, all expected too much of him. He was small, and over. He didn’t like to be reminded of his smallness, but more than that, he didn’t like to be reminded that other people might depend on him anyway.
“Fine,” Potter said, and there was a new note in his voice, something that almost fooled Draco into looking at him again. He fixed his eyes on his hands to prevent that temptation. “I thought this could be a new beginning for us, Malfoy. I see I was wrong.”
“Yes, you were,” Draco murmured.
Scorpius led Potter out of the room, already beginning to chatter. Draco was glad for that. Let Scorpius learn as much as he could from Potter. Let him make friends of Potter’s sons. Let him have the chances Draco had never had. It would be good for him, and that way, he wouldn’t make the many and unforgivable mistakes of cowardice and stupidity that Draco had.
When Draco was sure they were gone, he went back to his temple and his solitary worship of duty and the family.
*
“I’d think you would have anticipated this.”
Draco shook his head, and then shook it again. He had been feeling as though someone had dumped a basin of cold water on him since Astoria had announced she was leaving. Among the other things that disconcerted him about the announcement-the suddenness of it, his ignorance of Astoria’s unhappiness, his worry about what Scorpius would think-there was the thought that no divorces had happened in the Malfoy family. Ever. Spouses separated, or took other lovers, or tried to kill each other, but they didn’t simply part and then advertise the parting to the rest of the world. Weakness was not to be displayed beyond the marble walls of the Manor.
But it was easier for Draco to deal with than, say, the news of Scorpius’s divorce would have been. It was just another way he had failed his family.
“Why would I?” he asked at last. “You knew when we married that it was mostly for convenience and duty.”
Astoria took a deep breath and picked up her latest trunk of packed books. Her eyes were brilliant and stormy. Draco blinked at her. She looked like a beautiful woman now, and not the girl he remembered wedding. When had that happened?
“I know what it was,” she said. “And I know what I hoped it might become.”
Draco sighed in irritation. The shock was leaving him. He wanted to know a few things, and then he wanted to retreat to the Hall of the Ancestors again, and the people he loved and understood. “Why did you wait so long to leave, if you were so unhappy?”
“Because Scorpius is eight now. I think he can handle this.” Astoria arranged her robes around her legs. Those were technically his robes, Draco thought distantly, bought with his money, but he didn’t feel like challenging her. “And of course he can visit me at times, and I’ll make sure that he’s happy.”
“He’s happy here,” Draco said, mildly insulted.
Astoria looked up at him with grey eyes that were like stone now. “No, he’s not. You spend too much time with your ancestors and not enough with your son. Why?”
“You know what I lost in the war,” Draco began, half-happy to have an audience for his failures and inadequacies. That way, Astoria could understand why Draco had to be a custodian for those members of his family who had achieved more than he could.
“And I also know the war was sixteen years ago,” Astoria said, so sharply that Draco felt a dig in his heart, through the armor he had tried to force himself to wear against the world. “If you don’t get over this, then you’ll simply fossilize yourself. They’ll find you as a marble statue in the middle of your bloody Hall.” Her face was taut with anguish, and Draco struggled to understand why.
“I don’t think that’s the worst fate,” he offered, when he realized she hadn’t left yet because she was waiting for an answer.
Astoria closed her eyes and shook her head. “You’re hopeless,” she said. “Or at least you’ll require someone with a lot more patience than I have.” She turned and left, her robes snapping around her ankles.
Draco stood still, arms wrapped around himself. Astoria’s reference to becoming a marble statue made him feel chilled. He couldn’t remember that happening before.
As he turned to go back into the Manor, he caught his son’s eye. Scorpius stood on the stairs, his hands clenched around the banisters. His eyes were wide and tearless, which Draco hadn’t expected. It was a day of strange happenings.
He started forwards, meaning to touch Scorpius on the shoulder and say-something. He didn’t know what.
But his son turned and went up the stairs. Draco watched him until he turned the corner, and then his will drained out and he went back to his own sanctuary.
But Astoria had planted a seed of trouble that occasionally grew and troubled him more in the next years, as he looked around at the portraits and wondered if they would like his company as a statue, or whether they really only needed his money to keep the room comfortable, well-lit, and warded.
*
Laughter attracted him, and Draco finally gave up on reading the particularly dense history book he’d chosen-a book that Great-Great-Aunt Lavinia had written, and which was torturous even by Malfoy standards-and walked out of the Hall of the Ancestors to examine the possible scene through the nearest window.
Scorpius was running around the middle of the largest, flattest part of the grounds, scattering white peacocks with every charge. A Quaffle leaped about him, seemingly enchanted to go in random directions. Another boy ran with him, one with wild black hair flying and a mouth stretched wide in that annoying laughter.
Draco knew whose son he was without asking.
As he stood there, wondering whether he ought to go out and scold Scorpius for not having asked permission to bring a friend home, another figure joined them. This one was tall, and also had black hair, and Draco thought at first it was Potter’s elder son. But surely a boy who was only one year older than Scorpius wouldn’t be that tall.
Then a sense of inevitability settled into his bones, and yes, it was Potter’s face that briefly turned to the window.
Potter seemed to have caught sight of Draco, because he paused, brow furrowing. Draco found himself looking instinctively for the old scar, though the papers said that it had faded when Potter defeated the Dark Lord, but he was too far away to see it.
The boys ran in circles as the Quaffle bounced back into the air and hovered there, tauntingly far above their heads. It would only be a few minutes, Draco thought, before they complained to Potter and he turned back to lower it for them.
But there was that small space of frozen time where Potter and Draco stared into each other’s eyes.
And then, somehow still before Scorpius and the other boy gave into frustration, Potter extended one hand and curved it in an unmistakable beckoning gesture.
That was when Draco understood he would be welcome to emerge from the house and join the game.
He froze, staring, his hands locking so hard into the windowsill that he would find splinters driven beneath the skin later. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t make a decision, and so Scorpius and the other boy shouted, and Potter turned his back as though Draco was of no account after all. Why should he be, in the face of a new generation that wasn’t going to be prone to his mistakes?
Draco closed his eyes, more shaky than he should be when such a random moment had sliced across his senses.
And the treacherous thought came that he could go out. He could extend his hand to Potter, and play with his son, and learn the name of the small boy with black hair. There was nothing forbidding him from doing that.
Nothing except the voluntary exile he had undertaken from the world, the barrier that separated him because he must try not to impose his failures on his child. Scorpius could learn nothing from his example, could care nothing for him. Draco had to stay away or risk destroying what he had built so far. Maybe nine-year-olds weren’t as impressionable as infants, but still, they could absorb unwanted lessons.
Draco turned his back and walked with heavy steps into the Hall of the Ancestors, where a short time later he found himself studying the stone blocks in the walls and noting the heaviness of their placement.
Strange. He had never likened the Hall to the dungeons before.
*
“Malfoy! I need your help.”
The shock of hearing Potter’s voice made Draco drop the book he was reading. He cursed in his head as he turned about, though his expression remained as calm and perfect as he knew it should be. He had had much practice saying things to himself that he would never share with anyone else, because no one else would understand him.
But he knew, he knew, that he shouldn’t have let the late autumn sunshine tempt him out of the Hall of the Ancestors into reading a book on tracing magic through Muggles by the library fire. That just meant people could find him more easily.
“What is it, Potter?” he asked, standing back, because bending down would be a violation of his dignity. Potter, whose head floating in the flames proved that he didn’t care about bending down, gave him a single fierce glance.
“Scorpius and Al are missing,” he said. “They told me that they were going to leave their school and travel to your house today, but that was hours ago. When I asked your elves, they said they’d never arrived.”
“How do you know my elves well enough to talk to?” Draco asked, feeling oddly violated, as if he’d discovered that someone spied on him when he undressed at night.
No one had done that since Astoria, and Draco couldn’t imagine that anyone would be interested any time soon. But that didn’t lessen the surge of irritation at Potter’s words.
Potter gave him a flat stare. “It doesn’t matter. But I do spend time over here when I want to bring Al home, if you must know. Scorpius is lonely and needs a man to talk to.” His eyes were cutting, but Draco looked back at him silently, without response. Potter seemed to realize that Draco wouldn’t answer insults, because he snorted in disgust and went on, “We have to find them.”
“They’re probably fine,” Draco murmured. “Scorpius knows the countryside around the Manor well. Hiding for a lark would be more likely than something serious happening to them.”
Potter shook his head. “With all the enemies we both have, you still think that.”
A bitter laugh that Draco hadn’t intended to release bubbled from his throat. “You have enemies. No one has thought me worth coming after in years, and Scorpius isn’t old enough yet to be a threat to anyone.”
“That’s what you think,” Potter said, eyes almost compassionate. His voice altered again, becoming brisk. “In the meantime, this doesn’t help us find our sons. Meet me at the gates of your Manor in ten minutes. We’ll coordinate the search from there.”
Draco opened his mouth to refuse, but by then, Potter’s head had disappeared. Draco turned slowly and looked out the window, watching as the sunlight slanted across the lawns and touched the changing trees with curious fingers.
His son was out there somewhere. Ten years old. The future of the family, the future Draco had so often promised himself would be different from the family’s past, and better than it was.
And he found it hard to feel anything, as if all his emotions were muffled under the spreading knowledge of his own failures.
Draco caught his breath, blinked hard, and unfroze enough of himself to go and give orders to the elves, as well as to cast a Tempus Charm so that he could be sure he would make Potter’s deadline.
*
“You look much better in an outdoors environment than in that stuffy house, Malfoy.”
Draco hunched his shoulders and didn’t answer. This was the first time he had ventured out of the Manor in…he couldn’t even name the last time he’d passed the door. Perhaps it was on a journey to Diagon Alley that he had forgotten, or perhaps a time he had played outside with Scorpius, but it wasn’t coming to him now. He nodded to Potter and waited for him to explain how their sons had been lost.
Luckily, Potter had enough sense to realize that they should attend to business, instead of irrelevant personal remarks. He waved his wand, and a parchment map unfolded itself neatly from mid-air and fell into Draco’s hands. Draco accepted it with a blink and watched a red line blaze from Magical Experiences Primary School across the downs towards the Manor.
“This is the way that they should have taken,” Potter said briskly. “We’ll search along it first, because we don’t know yet if they’ve been kidnapped or not, and if they have, then we should find some signs of a struggle. I’ve taught Al to resist, at least. I don’t know if Scorpius has received similar training.”
He gave Draco a look so jaundiced, so disapproving, that it made the years vanish and Draco reacted as if they were still in school. “What would I need to train him to protect himself against?” he snapped. “Most of the time, the Manor’s wards and the house-elves would be more than enough to defend him from any threats.”
Potter smiled at him. His smile had changed, at least, so bright that Draco wondered if he needed fires in his house. “Good! That tells me something. Very well, let’s go look for Scorpius and Al.” He strode out, legs moving as though he did this every day. Draco shivered and cast a yearning look over his shoulder at the house behind him.
It had been so long since he was outside those walls. And he was afraid that he would be as much of a failure at finding his son as he was at everything else.
“Malfoy?”
Potter was waiting for him, one impatient eyebrow raised, his head tilted back to look over his shoulder as though he couldn’t imagine anything more tiresome than waiting.
This is Scorpius we’re talking about, Draco told himself forcefully, stung into action as much by the contempt in Potter’s eyes as anything else. My son. The future of my family. The boy who loves me, although God knows why.
“Coming,” he said, and managed to quicken the pace of his legs to match Potter’s, with some effort. His muscles creaked and groaned at him all the way, like doors long unused being opened once again.
*
The boys definitely weren’t in the school, or anywhere along the path that they would have walked from it towards the Manor. Draco, more worried now than anything, cast a spell that ought to let him find any traces of Scorpius if he had passed near; any locks of his hair or scraps of his robe would resonate to Draco’s magic. But he didn’t pick anything up, and had to shut his eyes a moment.
“We’ll find them, Malfoy.”
Draco widened his eyes and turned his head. Potter was standing next to him, one hand extended as if he’d been about to rest it on Draco’s shoulder. He promptly dropped it and turned away with a small cough. “I just don’t want you to worry,” he muttered. “It would distort your face.”
Draco didn’t know what that meant, and he really had no wish to explore it. He had thought of another method to locate Scorpius, since Potter the Master Auror was fresh out of ideas. “I need to Summon something from the Manor,” he said. “And then I need you to forget what you saw here and any intentions that you might have about reporting it to the authorities. Understand?”
Potter’s eyes widened apprehensively behind his glasses. “What are you going to do, Malfoy?”
Draco flicked his wand and cast the Summoning Charm without answering. Then they stood there in the pale light from the cloudy sky above, with Potter watching Draco suspiciously from the corner of an eye.
Draco looked back and made sure that he kept his own expression aloof. He was the one who came to me and demanded my help. He can put up with my methods if he doesn’t want to do this on his own.
The slight whistle of the traveling object cut the air, and then it smacked handily home into Draco’s palm. He turned it over and whispered the incantation that would check for any disruption in the seal. There was none, and he nodded and broke the seal with a stab of his fingernail.
“That looks like blood,” Potter said, voice thick. “Is it? This had better not be blood magic.”
“Not even if it finds our sons?” Draco asked softly, and Potter shut up, the way Draco had known he would. He thought he was getting it back again, his sense of how to handle and spar with Potter. “That’s why I told you to keep your mouth shut,” Draco added, and then carefully dribbled three drops of Scorpius’s blood into his palm.
The magic took effect almost immediately; it was a hanging spell Draco had cast ten years ago, when Scorpius was two days old, and left to complete itself if Scorpius’s blood should ever touch his father’s skin. The tingling pull that raced beneath his palm and up his arm was strong enough to jerk him around to face towards the west. Draco nodded. “This way.” He started jogging.
Potter came up beside him, striding fast and staring at him from the corner of an eye. Draco ignored him effortlessly, or almost so. It was hard not to preen in the face of the stare.
“That wasn’t like any blood magic I’ve ever seen,” Potter said, this time as though he were disappointed that he wouldn’t get to arrest Draco.
“That’s because this is Malfoy blood magic,” Draco said serenely, and left him to chew on that while his hand led him along the path to Scorpius.
They had to go further than Draco would have thought, and he had started to entertain the idea of a kidnapping after all before the tingling abruptly stopped. He looked down and found that they were standing in front of a small hillock, overgrown with huge, drooping ferns. Draco nodded and bent down.
“Come out of there this minute, Scorpius,” he said. “And bring Mr. Potter with you.” Potter would probably think it presumptuous if Draco called his son by his first name.
There was silence for a long moment. Draco once again used the blood, and his hand buzzed and itched and shot out to point at the northern edge of the hillock. Draco walked in that direction until his hand fell limp.
“I know you’re there, Scorpius,” he said. It was amazing how he could sound so calm when he was so angry. “Come out or I’ll use the Summoning Charm.”
Scorpius crawled into sight at last, on hands and knees, his head bowed, probably because he wanted to hide his expression of sullen resentment. The tousle-haired boy Draco had seen playing with him more than once followed, blinking at Draco with eyes as green as Potter’s own.
“Why did you do that?” Draco asked. He preempted Potter, probably in his rush to ask the same thing, and Potter shut his mouth and looked annoyed. Let him, Draco thought. This was important. His son had never done anything like this before, and it seemed strange that he would now, when he had only a few months to go until he started Hogwarts.
“Because I wanted to see if you’d notice,” Scorpius muttered, staring at his feet.
Draco shut his eyes for a moment. He could see the walls of the Hall of Ancestors so clearly. The portraits on them were beloved, familiar friends by now; he knew where all of them hung and the personalities of the people who filled them, even those who had never spoken to him. He knew its size. He knew the warmth of the fires. He would give a great deal to be back with the portraits, standing within it.
When he opened his eyes again, Potter and small Potter were watching him curiously. Draco ignored them. Scorpius was the one he needed to convince.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Scorpius looked up with wide eyes. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” Draco said. He hesitated, then knelt down in the grass. If he could, he would have chosen to have this confrontation happen in a different place, rather than in front of Potter and his son, but needs must. He put a hand on Scorpius’s shoulder, and Scorpius blinked even more. Draco wondered if his son could remember the last time his father had touched him; Draco wasn’t sure he could. “I should have paid more attention to you. I shouldn’t have spent so much time in the Manor.”
Scorpius started to say several things, but each time, emotion seemed to choke them off. “Why did you?” he whispered at last.
Draco shook his head. “After the war, and so many things being lost, I thought I was a failure. I married Astoria and had you. I did my duty to the family. Then I thought it would be best if I retreated, and let you grow up on your own. I’d made a hash of everything else, so I thought I’d make a hash of raising you. Besides, you were my ambassador to the outside world. I was nothing.”
Scorpius choked again. Then he said, “You were still my father.”
Draco nodded slowly. “I know. That’s why I’m sorry, because I should have realized that and stepped up long since.”
Scorpius leaned forwards until his brow rested against Draco’s shoulder. Draco stroked his hair and cast a glance that he knew was half-nervous, half-defiant, at Potter and small Potter.
Small Potter looked curious, but also was glancing a little sideways, as though he knew this was a private moment he shouldn’t watch. Potter had his hand on his son’s shoulder, and was smiling, for some reason. A huge, devouring smile, in fact, Draco thought, suspicion rising. As if he’d anticipated that Draco would apologize to Scorpius all along or some such rubbish.
Well, never mind. Draco turned back to Scorpius. “Don’t do something like that ever again,” he said. “No matter how much you want to get my attention. Break the windows in the Manor instead. Rip up my books. Knock down the Hall’s door. But not that.”
Scorpius stiffened. Then he said, “But you love the Manor.”
Draco licked his lips. This would be hard, very hard to say, with someone else watching, but he had to. “I love you more.”
Scorpius gave a little sob and flung himself forwards. Draco held him, head bowed, and tried not to meet Potter’s gaze. It was enough that one member of the Malfoy family insisted on showing his feelings.
But Scorpius was a child still, and not Draco, or Lucius, or Tiberius, or Helena, or any other Malfoy. Perhaps that individual expression and difference could be allowed.
Potter cleared his throat, which sounded like a chuckle. “I’m glad that this ended happily for all involved,” he said.
Draco glared at him and muttered, “You would say that,” but there was no heat in either look or words, and from Potter’s contented smile, he knew that.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/301722.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, Harry/Ginny, Draco/Astoria
Rating: PG
Warnings: Profanity, mentions of sex, angst and depression. Epilogue-compliant.
Wordcount: ~19,000
Summary: Draco has retreated into the Manor and shut himself up with the Malfoy family portraits and memoirs. These are his pantheon, the pattern he lives his life by. It will take his son and an unexpected friendship to change his worship.
Author’s Notes: This is a very quiet story, and Harry and Draco don’t have a full slash relationship as such. More of a Draco character study than anything else.
Pantheon
Draco knew his marriage was the most important decision he would ever make. This was his chance to contribute to the future of the family, his chance to produce the Malfoy heir who would go shining into the future. So he reviewed all the appropriate candidates very carefully.
He needed a beautiful bride. Beauty was the Malfoy inheritance as much as wealth and power were. So he could reject those, like Millicent Bulstrode, who might pass bulging eyes or a pug nose down to his child.
He needed someone with at least moderate wealth of her own. Nothing could prevent a Malfoy from marrying beneath himself in that respect, because they were so much richer than so many other pure-blood families, but there were those who were slight steps down and those were a tumble into the tarpit. Pansy Parkinson and the Greengrass girls, as well as several others, were on the acceptable level.
He needed a powerful wife. She could have political contacts, or intelligence, or quickness with her wand, or, ideally, all three. Draco could supply whatever she lacked, but he didn’t want to take the chance of too little being passed down to his child any more than he did with ugliness.
When those necessary preconditions came together in his mind, the choice was obvious. Astoria Greengrass was demure, poised, graceful, and more intelligent than her sister. She had pale blue eyes that Draco might have found watery in other circumstances, but they reminded him of his mother’s during the ball when they danced together for the second time and she lifted them to his face in the light of the candles.
Her skin was pale. Her hair was blonde-not necessary in the way the other characteristics were, but Draco had to admit he would prefer a blond child. She had a light, quick step that Draco learned to identify with no more than a single second’s forewarning. She had a small sense of humor and good skill with a wand.
She was the one. Draco offered for her, half-confident that he would be accepted, half-remembering that there were others searching for pure-blood women that spring, six years after Hogwarts, and that Astoria had her choice. If he couldn’t have her, he would offer for Daphne, who was not as poised as he would have liked but had plenty of intelligence behind her sharp tongue.
Astoria laid his fears to rest by accepting him. Her family might have been a problem, but they were the right kind of people, the ones who still appreciated the eternal verities-power, beauty, wealth-rather than the political fashion of the moment, which was to treat the Malfoys as outcasts. They nodded and smiled and expressed grave approval when Draco came to tell them what he and Astoria had decided.
They were married in a meadow on a summer morning, the sun soft and pale behind faint grey clouds, the breeze so gentle against their skin Draco could hardly feel it. They made their promises to each other with clasped hands and assessing sideways glances.
Draco remembered thinking it was a perfect moment, the weather as distant and polite to them as they were to each other, and the sky the color of his father’s eyes.
Dead in Azkaban, his father was, dead three months gone.
*
Astoria was pregnant a year after the marriage, and she carried the child as gracefully as she did everything else, with only a slightly paler face in the mornings after she was sick. Draco had never had to witness her vomiting, which he was grateful for. It was hard to imagine the Malfoys whose faces were pictured in the portraits that hung on his walls vomiting.
His ancestors had become his gods, by then.
His father was dead, and with his mother in exile, mourning in silence, Draco couldn’t discuss the past of his family with anyone. There was Astoria, and him. There would be the child. In the meantime, Draco stared at portraits and read histories and looked at tapestries of the family tree so that he might embody the Malfoys in himself.
There was Septimus Malfoy, who had let Muggles burn him to death rather than give up the location of his wife and sons. His face was strong and cold in his portrait, Draco thought. Stoic. He used his finger to trace the edge of Septimus’s cheek, and watched the man turn his head to stare at him. After a moment, he gave a stiff nod of approval.
Most Malfoys were blond, the way Draco was and the child would be, but black hair existed in a few members of the line, such as Helena Malfoy, who had married Frederic Parkinson. She was a tall woman, pictured with a small hunting dragon of the kind that had since gone extinct curled at her feet. She had black hair that cast blue shadows onto her pale skin and a cruel smile.
When she wanted to be alone, the dragon would breathe out smoke that filled the picture and blocked her from Draco’s sight. Draco had to admit it was an original method to get her way, more ingenious than simply moving to another portrait.
It took Draco months to earn her trust and entice her to converse with him, but when she did, Helena had worthwhile things to say.
“There have always been Malfoys who had to be guided,” she told him, sitting on the edge of the rich green chair in her library. The hunting dragon was asleep, its scales gleaming like jade. Helena glanced down at it and smiled, the smile of long companionship that Draco hoped he would eventually share with his wife. “My brother, for instance. Catullus was incapable of controlling a family by himself. He needed my advice, and our mother’s advice, but she died when we were twelve, and Catullus almost drove the family to ruin.”
Draco nodded. He had read the histories, but there was nothing like hearing history from the lips of one who had lived it. “What happened?” He already knew that Catullus and Helena had been twins, and Helena should have held the Malfoy lands and fortune and manor in her capable hands, but she had been several minutes younger than her brother.
Helena snorted softly. “He spent a lot of the family money on what the breeders swore were purebred Abraxans, when they looked to me like Muggle horses with stubby wings. I made him sell half of them and offer the others as broodmares for experimental breeders who wanted some Abraxan blood and didn’t care where they got it. He was sulky and thought he could order me to marry Frederic as a punishment.” She lifted her head, and the dragon woke and echoed her with an arch of its long neck. “What he didn’t understand was that I was glad to go. My home was bitter to me, after so many failures.”
“I wish I could be as great as you were,” Draco muttered.
Helena didn’t smile at him, but she gave him a single look from dark blue eyes and nodded once, a greater gift. “You will be,” she said.
And there were others, heroes and traitors, Muggle-hunters and great Ministry politicians. Draco wandered among them as Astoria grew rounder and rounder, and fell more and more in love with his own heritage.
*
They wouldn’t let him have the baby immediately, but when Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy was wiped free of blood and the liquid of the womb and laid safely in his cot, with Astoria sleeping exhausted in the bed nearby, Draco picked up his son and carried him into the Hall of the Ancestors, where the portraits of Helena and the others hung.
He carried the baby from picture to picture, letting the inhabitants of the portraits see him. Most of them exclaimed softly in admiration. A few turned away, but they were sullen people, or proud ones, who thought it was beneath their dignity to exclaim over a child, no matter how close he might be to them in blood. Helena nodded judiciously and stroked the neck of her hunting dragon so it wouldn’t get jealous when she wanted a longer look.
“That child has a look of my brother about him,” she said. “May he be smarter!”
“I’ll make sure that he is,” Draco vowed, cradling Scorpius against his chest. He made a small, sleepy movement with one foot, stretching it and extending the toes like a monkey. Draco considered the flushed, red look of his legs and had to admit that Helena’s eyesight was better than his. Draco couldn’t tell who among the ancestors he would look like yet. “His name is Scorpius Hyperion.”
Helena smiled a bit. “Continuing the naming tradition of your mother’s family? Well, there’s nothing wrong with either name. Liable to get him teased a bit in school, but that often happens with old family names.”
“It happened to me,” Draco said, memory returning in a flood of overwhelming bitterness. “My first day on the Hogwarts Express. A Weasley snickered at the mention of my name when I was trying to make friends with Harry Potter.”
“Harry Potter.” Helena linked her hands together behind her head. “Would that be the son of Charlus? Or the boy that Lucius used to pace up and down the hall ranting about?”
“It must have been the boy my father ranted about,” Draco said quietly. Had Lucius done that? Draco hadn’t known it. There were always more facts to be collected about his ancestors, it seemed, and carefully stored away, even the ancestors he was convinced he already understood. “Harry Potter’s father was named James. But he married a Mudblood.”
“That’s too bad,” Helena said. “There was real power in the Potter family, at one time, and a few of us did marry them, though I don’t think there were any recent intermarriages.”
Scorpius stretched against him. Draco held him closer still, checked the time to be sure that Astoria and the Healer wouldn’t wake and worry about where the boy had gone, and then shook his head. “No. I’ve read the records very carefully. No marriages more recent than 1692, and that one was a failure, without children.” He looked down at his son. “At least no one can say that I haven’t done my duty to the family now.”
“Is that all you ever think about?” Helena asked, and she sounded sad for some reason. “Doing your duty?”
“No,” Draco answered, looking up again. “I take pleasure in contemplating the history of the family, too.”
Helena sighed, but wouldn’t explain what she meant despite repeated questioning, and eventually Draco carried Scorpius back to the bedroom and put him in his cot. He stood there until dawn gazing down at his son, seeing in him his mother’s eyes, his father’s jaw, his grandfather’s eyebrows, and many other transient, fleeting features that were as yet unexplained.
Whatever he became, though, it comforted Draco to know that he would always be a Malfoy.
*
“Daddy!”
Draco turned his head, startled. Scorpius had never come into the Hall of the Ancestors unless Draco brought him, and it was especially inconvenient for him to turn up now, when Draco was arranging a new shelf of history books under the portraits that would be easily upset by small fingers.
But here he was now, a three-year-old with his thumb in his mouth, clutching the door and swaying back and forth as if he had come a long way. He still had some weakness in his legs, Draco thought, the result of his mother carrying him around all the time, and then the house-elves doing it, when he was younger. Scorpius hadn’t wanted to learn to walk, and he might have waited much longer if not for Draco’s insistence that his son not be a weakling.
Draco forced a smile. “Are you all right, Scorpius? Where’s your mother?”
“Mummy is sleeping,” Scorpius said. His words were usually grown-up, except that he insisted on addressing his parents by childish titles. Draco didn’t know why. He had called his parents “Father” and “Mother” by Scorpius’s age. Scorpius wandered further into the room, staring up at the portraits and looking enchanted when the mastiff pictured with old Tertius Malfoy-arrested for murder in his ninetieth year-growled down at him. “What is this place, Daddy?”
“The place where the history of your family resides,” Draco said, softening a little in spite of himself. It was true that Scorpius hadn’t come here often, that Draco had more and more made the room a private sanctuary in the past few years. But that was wrong; that was robbing his son of his heritage. “Would you like to learn more about them, Scorpius?”
Scorpius nodded eagerly, and Draco picked him up and carried him from painting to painting, as he had when he was younger. This time, though, he wasn’t introducing his child, the future, to the people who had lived before him and wanted to see the continuation of their blood. He was introducing his future to his past. He had never fulfilled any of the Malfoy ambitions; he had never done anything remarkable himself, except become a chronicler of the famous deeds of others. He hoped that Scorpius would do better.
“Who’s that?” Scorpius pointed at Tertius, who turned his head away and sneered. He didn’t have much use for anyone younger than fifty, Draco knew, and treated even Draco with a cold courtesy, though he did appreciate Draco polishing his portrait frame.
Draco told him the name, in the kind of heavy tone that Scorpius appeared to respect, and what he had done.
Scorpius didn’t really understand death yet, which probably counted for the way he wrinkled his nose. “That’s not good,” he said. “That’s not impressive.”
Tertius turned his head for one more cold glare, and then once again looked away. Scorpius, who hadn’t cared about the mastiff’s growl or the puffs of smoke that Helena’s dragon blew at him, started to cry about the glare for some reason. Draco tried to soothe him, but Scorpius’s tears got louder, and Draco finally took him to the door, where Astoria was waiting with open arms.
“What happened?” Astoria asked, looking over Draco’s shoulder as though she expected Draco to have a blade he’d threatened Scorpius’s life with. She really did treat him as if he were an interloper sometimes, Draco thought absently, as if he wasn’t Scorpius’s father and as concerned with the boy’s health as any of them.
“One of the portraits gave him an evil look,” Draco said. “He’ll handle it better when he’d older.”
For some reason, Astoria’s mouth crimped with bitterness. “Do you think he’ll be like you?” she asked. “Holing himself up with pictures and books, masticating the former greatness of the Malfoys over and over?”
“Of course not,” Draco said, considerably startled. “I hope that he’ll make the greatness present, and continue it.”
Astoria left without a word, back as straight as though she was angry about something. Draco shut the door and returned to working on his books.
*
“Why don’t you go outside more often, Daddy?”
Draco sighed. He was trying to teach his son history and genealogy whenever Scorpius didn’t have lessons with Astoria or Daphne, Astoria’s sister, who was his tutor. Lucius had taught Draco to read using the family records, and Draco wanted to experience the same tradition with his son. But Scorpius, while he sometimes paid attention, seemed to lose his place more often than not and ask irrelevant questions. Draco was sure that he had had a longer attention span at four.
“I don’t know what you mean, Scorpius.” He spoke firmly, to recall his son’s wandering focus from the enchanted windows in the Hall of the Ancestors that looked out, or seemed to, on the gardens and the walls. “Come back here, please, and see if you can read this sentence for me.”
Scorpius came back, though he kicked at the carpet when he walked. Draco felt his lips tighten. He would have to speak to Astoria again about speaking to Scorpius, or at least set house-elf minders on him. It wouldn’t do for Scorpius to go around kicking at the carpets when he was the master of Malfoy Manor. That was the best way to ruin them, and some of them, thanks to Preservation Charms, were hundreds of years old, woven from the hair of animals that no longer existed.
“I want to read something interesting,” said Draco’s puzzling son, sitting down next to him and subjecting him to a bright stare. Scorpius’s eyes were grey, but a paler grey than Lucius’s, closer to the blazing blue Draco remembered when his mother was angry. “Tell me about Harry Potter.”
Draco let his son see his mouth tightening this time. “That’s a silly, childish story,” he said repressively. “You need to read something that actually matters.”
“Everyone else thinks it’s interesting,” said Scorpius stubbornly. “Mummy thinks it’s interesting. The elves think it’s interesting. They whisper and cry about it. Auntie tells me how Harry Potter saved us all.”
Draco would have to ask Astoria to have a talk with Daphne, too. “Harry Potter was just a boy,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing, Scorpius. He didn’t mean to save people. He just rushed into the gap and was there in the right place, at the right time. That doesn’t make him a hero.”
Scorpius leaned forwards, staring in fascination for some reason, though Draco was sure he’d spoken in the sternest voice possible. “Why didn’t you like him, Daddy?”
“He was a spoiled brat,” Draco said, stressing the words and glaring at Scorpius. Pansy’s little boy, Horace, would have taken the hint, but Scorpius looked back with innocent blue eyes and thought nothing of the reprimand, so Draco had to answer the question. “He ran around breaking the rules and blaming other people. He thought he was so much better than Slytherins just because he was in Gryffindor.”
“I’d like to be in Gryffindor,” Scorpius said.
Draco sprang to his feet-he’d been sitting on the floor because he thought he should be more on Scorpius’s level when he was teaching him-and reached out, then caught himself and folded his hands behind his back. He would not shake Scorpius. He would never be violent with his child. “Don’t say that again,” he said coldly.
Scorpius grinned at him, eyes shining with childish mischief that Draco knew he had never possessed. “Gryffindor, Gryffindor, Gryffindor,” he sang, softly and tauntingly, so like a boy in Draco’s memories that he might actually have thought Astoria had cheated on him if Scorpius had black hair or green eyes.
About to snap something else, Draco stopped himself. What was he doing, losing his temper like this? Lady Cynthiana Malfoy had put up with more extreme provocation and still been so cold and still that her enemies had been ashamed and negotiated a truce with her that left the Manor standing.
He turned his back and folded his hands in front of him. “That’s enough of the lesson for today,” he said. “Leave me.”
More than the implied threat, it seemed, more than his yelling, that made Scorpius cry. Draco heard him run of the room, and winced as he slammed the door. Then he turned and went to pick up the history books.
“Children don’t like to learn from statues,” Helena told his back. “You can’t blame them for being excited when they came to life, no matter how briefly.”
Again, as she had often done before, she refused to explain what she’d meant, but gave him a look of pity. When he tried to shout at her, the hunting dragon breathed smoke out, clouding the portrait.
*
“Father.”
Draco lifted his head and smiled at his son. With the coming of his fifth year, Scorpius had learned correct address, and stood with his shoulders straight and his head held up like a Malfoy. When he came into the Hall of Ancestors, he spoke quietly and respectfully, as he had done now. “Yes, son?”
“Mother says that I can’t start flying until I go to Hogwarts.” Scorpius’s eyes were enormous, and there was a plea in them that Draco didn’t understand until he thought about the full meaning of his son’s words. Scorpius was probably hoping that Draco would intervene on his side in the dispute with Astoria. “Is that true? It’s not true, is it? I can go flying now? You learned when you were my age.”
Draco hesitated. On the one hand, it was true that every Malfoy should get flying expertise young. One of the ways that Scorpius might bring glory to their family was by being a wonderful Quidditch player.
On the other hand, Draco didn’t think that he ought to contradict Astoria if she was speaking on the grounds of safety. She spent more time with Scorpius and knew him better. Draco had to see him as a symbol.
“Father?”
Draco acknowledged quietly that there was another reason he was reluctant to venture beyond the Hall of the Ancestors. He hadn’t done anything as trivial as playing Quidditch in a long time, and if he failed in front of his son, he would shame them both, not to mention the Malfoys in general. Draco knew he was a long way from perfect, and Scorpius needed a better model than he was.
But the only other models who could really have taught him how to be a Malfoy were dead or living elsewhere. Astoria had only married into the family; she hadn’t taught herself to be more than demure and composed. The spark of greatness was missing from her, and so she couldn’t show it to Scorpius.
In his more troubled moments, Draco would wonder if that meant Scorpius was doomed never to be great, either. Would he take after both sides of his heritage, or only his father, or only his mother? Draco sometimes wondered whether he should have chosen a wife other than Astoria.
On the other hand, that meant Scorpius would never have been born. And Draco loved his son, as difficult as that could be to show sometimes.
“Father.”
Scorpius was staring at the floor now. And something in Draco, something that didn’t fear his ancestors’ disapproval quite as much as the rest, roused in him, and he stood up and went over to take his son’s hand.
“Come,” he said. “I’ll teach you the proper seat on a broom and how to resist the wind. That way, you’ll represent us well when you go to Hogwarts.”
Scorpius gave him an almost worshipful glance, which made Draco smile back even as he mentally disapproved. Scorpius shouldn’t look up to him so much, a flawed scion of the family. He would become more than that. Draco made a mental note to give him not only the histories of the Malfoys but the histories of great inventors and generals and Ministers from other families, too. He would have to blend qualities of all of them if he was to become the most famous wizard in a hundred generations.
That was the ambition Draco had for his son, though he had never voiced it aloud to himself before.
But he had to admit, the thought seemed unimportant beside Scorpius’s laughter when he had the broom hovering, and when Draco sat behind him and showed him how to fly, Scorpius laughed again and bounced up and down on the stick, and Draco tightened his arms around him not from fear of the danger but simply because he wanted to hold on to the moment.
It was completely worth it to be faced with Astoria’s pursed lips and shaking head later in the day.
And it was completely worth even the memories of Potter that flying stirred up and sent racing around his head.
*
“And that was how Harry Potter saved us all.”
That sentence was the only one Draco heard, but he could guess at the rest of the story. Slowly, he turned and marched towards the door of the room the voice had come from. He had to venture outside the Hall of the Ancestors at some point, but he didn’t like to do it often, and this was the major reason why. He always found a source of disappointment in the world other people called “real.”
He stood in the doorway and stared at Astoria, who sat in a rocking chair. Scorpius, six years old now, sat at her feet and stared up at her with bright eyes. His hand traveled restlessly back and forth along the carpet.
“Is that all?” he asked. “Is that really all? Didn’t he have any more adventures?”
Astoria smiled tenderly down at Scorpius, a smile that Draco couldn’t remember her ever giving him. Neither of them had seen him as yet. “He had other adventures, but ones that won’t do for you yet, not at your age,” she said, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head.
At least she has that much discretion. Draco had no wish to have his son learn about Potter’s disgusting success as an Auror or his fertile wedding with the Weasley bitch. He cleared his throat ostentatiously.
Scorpius looked up, his eyes wide. Astoria’s eyes were wider. She understood the meaning of the anger on his face, even if Scorpius didn’t.
“I think you should remember what was lost in that war,” Draco said, in the low voice he knew terrified his wife. “Names. Lives. Reputations. It’s not a shiny, happy tale fit for a child.”
“I know about the losses,” Scorpius said, as if he really did. “But I wanted Mum to tell me about Harry Potter. And she did.” He rose to his feet, clinging to the chair and watching Draco with an oddly defiant expression. “So you can’t be angry at her. Be angry at me.”
“Scorpius, be still,” Astoria said. She stood up, too, and rested her hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Go to bed.”
“But-” Scorpius looked up at her, and then the words died. He hunched his shoulders and plodded past Draco. Draco watched him go and thought about disciplining him further, but he had to exchange words with his wife, not his son. Scorpius would learn of his displeasure later, when Draco could be more diplomatic about it.
They both waited until they could hear the sound of a door shutting, which would be the door to Scorpius’s bedroom. Draco turned to deliver his lecture, only to find that Astoria had attacked first, which was entirely uncharacteristic of her.
“You spend all your days in the past,” she said, her eyes bright enough that they lost all resemblance to eyes Draco had loved and known. “You don’t know anything about the future, about the man our son is growing up to be. In fact, you’ll probably be disappointed that he’s not a proper Malfoy, whatever that is. He loves you and wants you with him, and you give him history books to read. You’re impossible, Draco. Can’t you see that the house and your life are decaying around you?”
Draco had intended to argue. He really had.
But what she said threw him back on his loss, the grief that pulsed under the surface and made every breath he drew a struggle sometimes. If it hadn’t been for the books to tend and read, the artifacts to clean, the portraits who expected his company, Draco would have lain in bed some days and stared at the ceiling. What else was there to do?
Accusations. Proof that he wasn’t good enough. That was all he would ever get if he emerged into the world.
“Just don’t tell him stories about Harry Potter again,” Draco said, and turned away, leaving Astoria with her mouth open.
The Hall of the Ancestors shone with comforting, welcoming light. Draco had paid handsomely for expensive covered torches that would burn bright but not provide open flames that could damage his heritage. He had installed them himself, since he didn’t want anyone without Malfoy blood in this room. He shut the door behind him.
*
“There’s someone here to see you, Father.”
Draco put aside the book he was reading and frowned at Scorpius, who stood next to Great-Uncle Tiberius’s portrait. Tiberius Malfoy had been a daring and inventive duelist who had died in one of his duels before his thirtieth birthday, but that was no reason not to put up a memorial to him. “What do you mean? Why are you announcing it to me, and not one of the house-elves?”
Scorpius stared at him without answering. He was seven now, and ever since he had started going to wizarding primary school, Draco thought something had changed in him. He was more thoughtful, slower to answer back, but also slower to obey.
“You’ll see,” Scorpius said, and then turned and walked out of the Hall of the Ancestors. Draco had to sigh and follow, since if Scorpius was lying they would have to have another talk about obedience, and if he wasn’t, this might be an important visitor from the Ministry who needed to be placated or bribed.
Harry Potter stood in the drawing room.
Draco halted in the doorway, physically incapable of going further. Potter had his back to Draco as he examined one of the shelves on the wall, but there was no mistaking him. Not that wild dark hair, that shaggy way he wore his cloak and his scarlet Auror robes, or that unbalanced stance of his, more suited to a Quidditch broom than the ground.
“Here he is,” Scorpius said loudly. It was impossible to be sure which of them he was addressing.
Potter turned around.
Those green eyes hit him like a blow. Draco winced, and hoped he covered it by moving to the side and indifferently nodding to Potter. “What have you come to ask me?” he said. “As far as I know, Mother hasn’t come back into the country since the Ministry exiled her, and your lot have already looked for Dark artifacts in every conceivable corner of the Manor.” No need to feign the bitterness in his voice then, not when those searches had torn the Manor apart.
“Father!” Scorpius hissed.
Potter, surprisingly, smiled, and then moved forwards, holding his hand out. “No need for insults,” he said. “I’m not here on Ministry business. I’m here because my sons will start attending the same primary school as your son does soon, and I wanted to ask a few questions and notify you that they’d be here.”
Draco kept his arms folded and didn’t reach out to take Potter’s hand. It would be wrong. He had abandoned his own past, letting it be absorbed into the past of his family. He was a failure, not someone who could add to the Malfoy greatness. “You should speak to my wife,” he said. “She’s the one who arranged for Scorpius to attend that particular school and knows everything about it.”
Potter lowered his hand and stared hard at him. Draco glared back. He hoped that Potter couldn’t hear how hard his heart was pounding, or see how hard it was for him to keep standing there instead of bolting away.
It wasn’t…
He couldn’t turn back in time like that. For all the time he spent among portraits and history books, he knew that he couldn’t stop things from changing. The problem was, he had mucked everything up when he had tried to act on his own behalf. The last important act he would ever commit was begetting Scorpius. He had done that now, and so done his duty. Now he could stay silent while Scorpius went out into the world and added another name to the pantheon of Draco’s dreams.
“I’ll speak with her, then.” Potter’s voice was clipped, and his eyes cold. Draco was glad to see it. Rudeness, coldness, couldn’t set fire to dreams and regrets that he should have outgrown long ago. “Where is she?”
“I have no idea,” Draco said, and then turned his head to look at his son. “I imagine Scorpius can take you to her.”
Scorpius stood there with his hands in fists at his sides, eyes wide and hurt. Betrayed.
Draco looked down. Scorpius, Potter, Astoria, all expected too much of him. He was small, and over. He didn’t like to be reminded of his smallness, but more than that, he didn’t like to be reminded that other people might depend on him anyway.
“Fine,” Potter said, and there was a new note in his voice, something that almost fooled Draco into looking at him again. He fixed his eyes on his hands to prevent that temptation. “I thought this could be a new beginning for us, Malfoy. I see I was wrong.”
“Yes, you were,” Draco murmured.
Scorpius led Potter out of the room, already beginning to chatter. Draco was glad for that. Let Scorpius learn as much as he could from Potter. Let him make friends of Potter’s sons. Let him have the chances Draco had never had. It would be good for him, and that way, he wouldn’t make the many and unforgivable mistakes of cowardice and stupidity that Draco had.
When Draco was sure they were gone, he went back to his temple and his solitary worship of duty and the family.
*
“I’d think you would have anticipated this.”
Draco shook his head, and then shook it again. He had been feeling as though someone had dumped a basin of cold water on him since Astoria had announced she was leaving. Among the other things that disconcerted him about the announcement-the suddenness of it, his ignorance of Astoria’s unhappiness, his worry about what Scorpius would think-there was the thought that no divorces had happened in the Malfoy family. Ever. Spouses separated, or took other lovers, or tried to kill each other, but they didn’t simply part and then advertise the parting to the rest of the world. Weakness was not to be displayed beyond the marble walls of the Manor.
But it was easier for Draco to deal with than, say, the news of Scorpius’s divorce would have been. It was just another way he had failed his family.
“Why would I?” he asked at last. “You knew when we married that it was mostly for convenience and duty.”
Astoria took a deep breath and picked up her latest trunk of packed books. Her eyes were brilliant and stormy. Draco blinked at her. She looked like a beautiful woman now, and not the girl he remembered wedding. When had that happened?
“I know what it was,” she said. “And I know what I hoped it might become.”
Draco sighed in irritation. The shock was leaving him. He wanted to know a few things, and then he wanted to retreat to the Hall of the Ancestors again, and the people he loved and understood. “Why did you wait so long to leave, if you were so unhappy?”
“Because Scorpius is eight now. I think he can handle this.” Astoria arranged her robes around her legs. Those were technically his robes, Draco thought distantly, bought with his money, but he didn’t feel like challenging her. “And of course he can visit me at times, and I’ll make sure that he’s happy.”
“He’s happy here,” Draco said, mildly insulted.
Astoria looked up at him with grey eyes that were like stone now. “No, he’s not. You spend too much time with your ancestors and not enough with your son. Why?”
“You know what I lost in the war,” Draco began, half-happy to have an audience for his failures and inadequacies. That way, Astoria could understand why Draco had to be a custodian for those members of his family who had achieved more than he could.
“And I also know the war was sixteen years ago,” Astoria said, so sharply that Draco felt a dig in his heart, through the armor he had tried to force himself to wear against the world. “If you don’t get over this, then you’ll simply fossilize yourself. They’ll find you as a marble statue in the middle of your bloody Hall.” Her face was taut with anguish, and Draco struggled to understand why.
“I don’t think that’s the worst fate,” he offered, when he realized she hadn’t left yet because she was waiting for an answer.
Astoria closed her eyes and shook her head. “You’re hopeless,” she said. “Or at least you’ll require someone with a lot more patience than I have.” She turned and left, her robes snapping around her ankles.
Draco stood still, arms wrapped around himself. Astoria’s reference to becoming a marble statue made him feel chilled. He couldn’t remember that happening before.
As he turned to go back into the Manor, he caught his son’s eye. Scorpius stood on the stairs, his hands clenched around the banisters. His eyes were wide and tearless, which Draco hadn’t expected. It was a day of strange happenings.
He started forwards, meaning to touch Scorpius on the shoulder and say-something. He didn’t know what.
But his son turned and went up the stairs. Draco watched him until he turned the corner, and then his will drained out and he went back to his own sanctuary.
But Astoria had planted a seed of trouble that occasionally grew and troubled him more in the next years, as he looked around at the portraits and wondered if they would like his company as a statue, or whether they really only needed his money to keep the room comfortable, well-lit, and warded.
*
Laughter attracted him, and Draco finally gave up on reading the particularly dense history book he’d chosen-a book that Great-Great-Aunt Lavinia had written, and which was torturous even by Malfoy standards-and walked out of the Hall of the Ancestors to examine the possible scene through the nearest window.
Scorpius was running around the middle of the largest, flattest part of the grounds, scattering white peacocks with every charge. A Quaffle leaped about him, seemingly enchanted to go in random directions. Another boy ran with him, one with wild black hair flying and a mouth stretched wide in that annoying laughter.
Draco knew whose son he was without asking.
As he stood there, wondering whether he ought to go out and scold Scorpius for not having asked permission to bring a friend home, another figure joined them. This one was tall, and also had black hair, and Draco thought at first it was Potter’s elder son. But surely a boy who was only one year older than Scorpius wouldn’t be that tall.
Then a sense of inevitability settled into his bones, and yes, it was Potter’s face that briefly turned to the window.
Potter seemed to have caught sight of Draco, because he paused, brow furrowing. Draco found himself looking instinctively for the old scar, though the papers said that it had faded when Potter defeated the Dark Lord, but he was too far away to see it.
The boys ran in circles as the Quaffle bounced back into the air and hovered there, tauntingly far above their heads. It would only be a few minutes, Draco thought, before they complained to Potter and he turned back to lower it for them.
But there was that small space of frozen time where Potter and Draco stared into each other’s eyes.
And then, somehow still before Scorpius and the other boy gave into frustration, Potter extended one hand and curved it in an unmistakable beckoning gesture.
That was when Draco understood he would be welcome to emerge from the house and join the game.
He froze, staring, his hands locking so hard into the windowsill that he would find splinters driven beneath the skin later. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t make a decision, and so Scorpius and the other boy shouted, and Potter turned his back as though Draco was of no account after all. Why should he be, in the face of a new generation that wasn’t going to be prone to his mistakes?
Draco closed his eyes, more shaky than he should be when such a random moment had sliced across his senses.
And the treacherous thought came that he could go out. He could extend his hand to Potter, and play with his son, and learn the name of the small boy with black hair. There was nothing forbidding him from doing that.
Nothing except the voluntary exile he had undertaken from the world, the barrier that separated him because he must try not to impose his failures on his child. Scorpius could learn nothing from his example, could care nothing for him. Draco had to stay away or risk destroying what he had built so far. Maybe nine-year-olds weren’t as impressionable as infants, but still, they could absorb unwanted lessons.
Draco turned his back and walked with heavy steps into the Hall of the Ancestors, where a short time later he found himself studying the stone blocks in the walls and noting the heaviness of their placement.
Strange. He had never likened the Hall to the dungeons before.
*
“Malfoy! I need your help.”
The shock of hearing Potter’s voice made Draco drop the book he was reading. He cursed in his head as he turned about, though his expression remained as calm and perfect as he knew it should be. He had had much practice saying things to himself that he would never share with anyone else, because no one else would understand him.
But he knew, he knew, that he shouldn’t have let the late autumn sunshine tempt him out of the Hall of the Ancestors into reading a book on tracing magic through Muggles by the library fire. That just meant people could find him more easily.
“What is it, Potter?” he asked, standing back, because bending down would be a violation of his dignity. Potter, whose head floating in the flames proved that he didn’t care about bending down, gave him a single fierce glance.
“Scorpius and Al are missing,” he said. “They told me that they were going to leave their school and travel to your house today, but that was hours ago. When I asked your elves, they said they’d never arrived.”
“How do you know my elves well enough to talk to?” Draco asked, feeling oddly violated, as if he’d discovered that someone spied on him when he undressed at night.
No one had done that since Astoria, and Draco couldn’t imagine that anyone would be interested any time soon. But that didn’t lessen the surge of irritation at Potter’s words.
Potter gave him a flat stare. “It doesn’t matter. But I do spend time over here when I want to bring Al home, if you must know. Scorpius is lonely and needs a man to talk to.” His eyes were cutting, but Draco looked back at him silently, without response. Potter seemed to realize that Draco wouldn’t answer insults, because he snorted in disgust and went on, “We have to find them.”
“They’re probably fine,” Draco murmured. “Scorpius knows the countryside around the Manor well. Hiding for a lark would be more likely than something serious happening to them.”
Potter shook his head. “With all the enemies we both have, you still think that.”
A bitter laugh that Draco hadn’t intended to release bubbled from his throat. “You have enemies. No one has thought me worth coming after in years, and Scorpius isn’t old enough yet to be a threat to anyone.”
“That’s what you think,” Potter said, eyes almost compassionate. His voice altered again, becoming brisk. “In the meantime, this doesn’t help us find our sons. Meet me at the gates of your Manor in ten minutes. We’ll coordinate the search from there.”
Draco opened his mouth to refuse, but by then, Potter’s head had disappeared. Draco turned slowly and looked out the window, watching as the sunlight slanted across the lawns and touched the changing trees with curious fingers.
His son was out there somewhere. Ten years old. The future of the family, the future Draco had so often promised himself would be different from the family’s past, and better than it was.
And he found it hard to feel anything, as if all his emotions were muffled under the spreading knowledge of his own failures.
Draco caught his breath, blinked hard, and unfroze enough of himself to go and give orders to the elves, as well as to cast a Tempus Charm so that he could be sure he would make Potter’s deadline.
*
“You look much better in an outdoors environment than in that stuffy house, Malfoy.”
Draco hunched his shoulders and didn’t answer. This was the first time he had ventured out of the Manor in…he couldn’t even name the last time he’d passed the door. Perhaps it was on a journey to Diagon Alley that he had forgotten, or perhaps a time he had played outside with Scorpius, but it wasn’t coming to him now. He nodded to Potter and waited for him to explain how their sons had been lost.
Luckily, Potter had enough sense to realize that they should attend to business, instead of irrelevant personal remarks. He waved his wand, and a parchment map unfolded itself neatly from mid-air and fell into Draco’s hands. Draco accepted it with a blink and watched a red line blaze from Magical Experiences Primary School across the downs towards the Manor.
“This is the way that they should have taken,” Potter said briskly. “We’ll search along it first, because we don’t know yet if they’ve been kidnapped or not, and if they have, then we should find some signs of a struggle. I’ve taught Al to resist, at least. I don’t know if Scorpius has received similar training.”
He gave Draco a look so jaundiced, so disapproving, that it made the years vanish and Draco reacted as if they were still in school. “What would I need to train him to protect himself against?” he snapped. “Most of the time, the Manor’s wards and the house-elves would be more than enough to defend him from any threats.”
Potter smiled at him. His smile had changed, at least, so bright that Draco wondered if he needed fires in his house. “Good! That tells me something. Very well, let’s go look for Scorpius and Al.” He strode out, legs moving as though he did this every day. Draco shivered and cast a yearning look over his shoulder at the house behind him.
It had been so long since he was outside those walls. And he was afraid that he would be as much of a failure at finding his son as he was at everything else.
“Malfoy?”
Potter was waiting for him, one impatient eyebrow raised, his head tilted back to look over his shoulder as though he couldn’t imagine anything more tiresome than waiting.
This is Scorpius we’re talking about, Draco told himself forcefully, stung into action as much by the contempt in Potter’s eyes as anything else. My son. The future of my family. The boy who loves me, although God knows why.
“Coming,” he said, and managed to quicken the pace of his legs to match Potter’s, with some effort. His muscles creaked and groaned at him all the way, like doors long unused being opened once again.
*
The boys definitely weren’t in the school, or anywhere along the path that they would have walked from it towards the Manor. Draco, more worried now than anything, cast a spell that ought to let him find any traces of Scorpius if he had passed near; any locks of his hair or scraps of his robe would resonate to Draco’s magic. But he didn’t pick anything up, and had to shut his eyes a moment.
“We’ll find them, Malfoy.”
Draco widened his eyes and turned his head. Potter was standing next to him, one hand extended as if he’d been about to rest it on Draco’s shoulder. He promptly dropped it and turned away with a small cough. “I just don’t want you to worry,” he muttered. “It would distort your face.”
Draco didn’t know what that meant, and he really had no wish to explore it. He had thought of another method to locate Scorpius, since Potter the Master Auror was fresh out of ideas. “I need to Summon something from the Manor,” he said. “And then I need you to forget what you saw here and any intentions that you might have about reporting it to the authorities. Understand?”
Potter’s eyes widened apprehensively behind his glasses. “What are you going to do, Malfoy?”
Draco flicked his wand and cast the Summoning Charm without answering. Then they stood there in the pale light from the cloudy sky above, with Potter watching Draco suspiciously from the corner of an eye.
Draco looked back and made sure that he kept his own expression aloof. He was the one who came to me and demanded my help. He can put up with my methods if he doesn’t want to do this on his own.
The slight whistle of the traveling object cut the air, and then it smacked handily home into Draco’s palm. He turned it over and whispered the incantation that would check for any disruption in the seal. There was none, and he nodded and broke the seal with a stab of his fingernail.
“That looks like blood,” Potter said, voice thick. “Is it? This had better not be blood magic.”
“Not even if it finds our sons?” Draco asked softly, and Potter shut up, the way Draco had known he would. He thought he was getting it back again, his sense of how to handle and spar with Potter. “That’s why I told you to keep your mouth shut,” Draco added, and then carefully dribbled three drops of Scorpius’s blood into his palm.
The magic took effect almost immediately; it was a hanging spell Draco had cast ten years ago, when Scorpius was two days old, and left to complete itself if Scorpius’s blood should ever touch his father’s skin. The tingling pull that raced beneath his palm and up his arm was strong enough to jerk him around to face towards the west. Draco nodded. “This way.” He started jogging.
Potter came up beside him, striding fast and staring at him from the corner of an eye. Draco ignored him effortlessly, or almost so. It was hard not to preen in the face of the stare.
“That wasn’t like any blood magic I’ve ever seen,” Potter said, this time as though he were disappointed that he wouldn’t get to arrest Draco.
“That’s because this is Malfoy blood magic,” Draco said serenely, and left him to chew on that while his hand led him along the path to Scorpius.
They had to go further than Draco would have thought, and he had started to entertain the idea of a kidnapping after all before the tingling abruptly stopped. He looked down and found that they were standing in front of a small hillock, overgrown with huge, drooping ferns. Draco nodded and bent down.
“Come out of there this minute, Scorpius,” he said. “And bring Mr. Potter with you.” Potter would probably think it presumptuous if Draco called his son by his first name.
There was silence for a long moment. Draco once again used the blood, and his hand buzzed and itched and shot out to point at the northern edge of the hillock. Draco walked in that direction until his hand fell limp.
“I know you’re there, Scorpius,” he said. It was amazing how he could sound so calm when he was so angry. “Come out or I’ll use the Summoning Charm.”
Scorpius crawled into sight at last, on hands and knees, his head bowed, probably because he wanted to hide his expression of sullen resentment. The tousle-haired boy Draco had seen playing with him more than once followed, blinking at Draco with eyes as green as Potter’s own.
“Why did you do that?” Draco asked. He preempted Potter, probably in his rush to ask the same thing, and Potter shut his mouth and looked annoyed. Let him, Draco thought. This was important. His son had never done anything like this before, and it seemed strange that he would now, when he had only a few months to go until he started Hogwarts.
“Because I wanted to see if you’d notice,” Scorpius muttered, staring at his feet.
Draco shut his eyes for a moment. He could see the walls of the Hall of Ancestors so clearly. The portraits on them were beloved, familiar friends by now; he knew where all of them hung and the personalities of the people who filled them, even those who had never spoken to him. He knew its size. He knew the warmth of the fires. He would give a great deal to be back with the portraits, standing within it.
When he opened his eyes again, Potter and small Potter were watching him curiously. Draco ignored them. Scorpius was the one he needed to convince.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Scorpius looked up with wide eyes. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” Draco said. He hesitated, then knelt down in the grass. If he could, he would have chosen to have this confrontation happen in a different place, rather than in front of Potter and his son, but needs must. He put a hand on Scorpius’s shoulder, and Scorpius blinked even more. Draco wondered if his son could remember the last time his father had touched him; Draco wasn’t sure he could. “I should have paid more attention to you. I shouldn’t have spent so much time in the Manor.”
Scorpius started to say several things, but each time, emotion seemed to choke them off. “Why did you?” he whispered at last.
Draco shook his head. “After the war, and so many things being lost, I thought I was a failure. I married Astoria and had you. I did my duty to the family. Then I thought it would be best if I retreated, and let you grow up on your own. I’d made a hash of everything else, so I thought I’d make a hash of raising you. Besides, you were my ambassador to the outside world. I was nothing.”
Scorpius choked again. Then he said, “You were still my father.”
Draco nodded slowly. “I know. That’s why I’m sorry, because I should have realized that and stepped up long since.”
Scorpius leaned forwards until his brow rested against Draco’s shoulder. Draco stroked his hair and cast a glance that he knew was half-nervous, half-defiant, at Potter and small Potter.
Small Potter looked curious, but also was glancing a little sideways, as though he knew this was a private moment he shouldn’t watch. Potter had his hand on his son’s shoulder, and was smiling, for some reason. A huge, devouring smile, in fact, Draco thought, suspicion rising. As if he’d anticipated that Draco would apologize to Scorpius all along or some such rubbish.
Well, never mind. Draco turned back to Scorpius. “Don’t do something like that ever again,” he said. “No matter how much you want to get my attention. Break the windows in the Manor instead. Rip up my books. Knock down the Hall’s door. But not that.”
Scorpius stiffened. Then he said, “But you love the Manor.”
Draco licked his lips. This would be hard, very hard to say, with someone else watching, but he had to. “I love you more.”
Scorpius gave a little sob and flung himself forwards. Draco held him, head bowed, and tried not to meet Potter’s gaze. It was enough that one member of the Malfoy family insisted on showing his feelings.
But Scorpius was a child still, and not Draco, or Lucius, or Tiberius, or Helena, or any other Malfoy. Perhaps that individual expression and difference could be allowed.
Potter cleared his throat, which sounded like a chuckle. “I’m glad that this ended happily for all involved,” he said.
Draco glared at him and muttered, “You would say that,” but there was no heat in either look or words, and from Potter’s contented smile, he knew that.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/301722.html. Comment wherever you like.