InsaneJournal

Butterfly

He had never been a particularly sickly child, even though he had looked it. Pale and wan, he should’ve caught every ailment, magical or not, under the sun. However, he had made it through from the age of five to twenty five without catching anything more serious than the common cold, which was easily cured by Pepper-Up potion, or else endured with the barest amount of sniffling and headaches. His mother had once joked that he could catch a cold and no one aside from him would be the wiser, he was so unaffected by them.

But this had been no ordinary illness. Astoria had been nearly due to give birth when he had been set down with the most dreadful coughing, sneezing and chocking fit that the mediwitch who had came had sent him straight along to St Mungo’s with barely a look at him. There, the Healers had prodded and poked, had fed him potion after potion, but nothing could alleviate the headaches, the copious amounts of snot running from his nostrils, the aching in his limbs, the pains in his chest, his impaired vision, his inability to digest anything but the blandest of food, his decreased mental faculties. The last was the worst. Some days he found that he could barely think to write, or do a simple addition sum.

The most annoying thing was that no one had been able to diagnose what was wrong with him. Specialists from all over England, Europe, even wizards and witches from America, had come to see him, to see what was wrong with him. He had been surprised at first, of course – who wouldn’t be surprised at everyone rushing to the aid of someone who had been Marked? – but he had decided, as time went on, that the challenge he portrayed to the medical community meant that the scar on his arm was forgotten. Yet however many so called specialists came, the same number went away, disgruntled and unable to do anything.

Strangely, it had been the constant people, not the illness, which had irritated him the most. He’d never really got used to the strange suits that everyone had worn around him, with their rustling noise and the faint glow of protection charms around them that hurt his eyes. Now he was out of there, now he had finally been cured, that was the thing that he was the most thankful for – the fact that he would never have to see one of those suits again.

Well, maybe not the most thankful. Sighing, he looked out of the window. The garden stretched out below him, neatly kept, trimmed to perfection. He really was thankful that Astoria had good tastes. For an arranged marriage, it had worked out very well.

There was a figure running through the garden now: a child, barely three years old. He looked just as robust as Draco had been at his age; indeed, he looked almost identical to the young boy that populated the pictures in Narcissa Malfoy’s boudoir. Only the smile on his face was different: brighter, much more open than Draco’s had ever been. He wondered, as he stood there, watching the little boy run around, whether it had anything to do with a lack of father in the first few years of his life. Whilst Draco loved Lucius, he knew now that the austere figure from his childhood, and the pacts with the darkness that his father had made, had probably shaped his earlier years and turned him into the older child, the teen, the young man that he had become. He blamed the more middle-aged version of himself on Narcissa and Astoria, of course. Since Lucius’ incarceration, he’d mellowed and become more the sort of man that he wanted little Scorpius to become.

He sighed again. Speaking of his son, it was probably about time he actually met him. It had taken nearly three years before Luna Lovegood – although she wasn’t Lovegood any more, was she? – came back from some adventure or other in some inhospitable place with a cure-all substance. It didn’t cure everything, of course, nothing could do that, but it cured a hell of a lot, and one of the first people they tried out this new substance on was Draco Malfoy.

He hadn’t expected it to work, but it had. It had taken another month before he had recovered enough to be allowed home – much to the irritation of the Healers, who wanted to study him and find out where the illness had come from, but he didn’t want to be studied like an animal at a zoo, had just given them a blood sample and left – and he still didn’t want to be too near his family, just in case, so he had taken a bedroom in another wing of the Manor, away from the rest of the inhabitants. But watching the young boy run around in the garden, seeing his mother and his wife sitting in deck chairs and talking to each other, he felt a sudden pang of loss for all the years he had missed. He was half way across the room, the desire to walk into the garden firmly implanted in his head, before he even realised what he was doing.

He stopped himself immediately, of course. A Malfoy does not do anything without due consideration. He frowned. But why not? Those were the old Malfoys; his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather who he had never met, even himself. He wanted the new Malfoys, like his son, to be more… more human, less stuck in their ways. He wanted his son to see someone on the train, or in a robe shop, that he liked the look of, and to actually be able to make friends with them.

So he carried on walking: through the Manor, along various corridors, down various staircases, until he reached the kitchen and the outside door. The house-elves stared at him as he strode between them, but he paid them no attention. Instead, he flung open the back door and walked out into the sunlight.

It was warm on his skin, something that he hadn’t felt for years, and this made him stop in his tracks before he could get to where the rest of his family were sitting. Instead, he did something that he would never have let himself do when he was younger: he closed his eyes and looked straight up at the sun, smiling as its golden rays caressed his face. When you’ve spent three years cooped up, you take things like the sun for granted far less.

The smell of outside wafted around him, flowers and newly cut grass, and he could hear one of the fountains that populated the Manor gardens in his ears. There were birds in the trees and he allowed himself a few moments to listen to their inane chattering. It had always annoyed him, back before he’d been cooped up for years, but he didn;t care now. Birdsong was one of the things that he had not been able to have.

He was so absorbed with the light above him, the sounds and scents all around him, that he didn’t realise he wasn’t alone until he felt a hand tug on his robes. Frowning slightly, he looked down and opened his eyes to see a carbon copy of himself, only younger, staring straight back at him. His son looking at him for the first time made Draco’s mouth go dry and he couldn’t find the words to talk. Well, what does one say to the son they’ve never met?

“Who are you?” Scorpius asked. It took Draco a while before he could get enough moisture in his mouth to be able to speak.

“I’m Draco Malfoy.”

“Malfoy’s my name,” the boy said with a frown.

“I know. I’m… I’m your father.”

“Really?” Draco nodded. “Oh.” Scorpius smiled. “Can I show you something?”

“Sure.” Draco watched as Scorpius’ smile turned secretive and he raised his hand, previously clutched in a light fist by his side, until it was level with his face. Frowning, Draco knelt until his face was at the same height as his son’s. “What is it?”

Scorpius gestured for Draco to look closely at the fist – or, more importantly, Draco realised as he peered at it, at the space inside the cage of fingers. He saw something moving in there, a rapid beating of something which made Scorpius laugh as it tickled his palm.

“What is it?”

“It’s a flutterby.”

The butterfly’s wings were beating faster now, hitting Scorpius’ hands with enough force to dislodge some of their scales before they stopped altogether. “I don’t think it’s very happy in there,” Draco murmured as he watched. Scorpius frowned.

“But I will take good care of it.”

“I know you will, but there’s nothing better than being at home. For the butterfly, your hands are not its home.”

Scorpius’ frown deepened, and then he slowly released his fingers. The butterfly didn’t seem to realise it was free at first and stayed perfectly still in the young boy’s palm before a breath of wind stirred its wings and it launched itself into the air. Draco watched as it flew; its flight path not straight, but nevertheless obvious that it was heading home, was already there.

“Come on.” He stood back up and reached down with his hand to clasp one of his son’s. “Let’s go and say hi to your grandma and mother, shall we?”