My son changed after the war and I guess I did too.
Me and Narcissa we split up. All those years together, every single thing we got through together, bringing our son up together, just us. Then it was over, she was gone the morning after the war. Of course we had a lengthy discussion but she couldn't stand to be around me anymore, she blamed me and I blamed myself too.
When your father is a strict bastard you want to do everything to rebel. No matter what it was so long as it would piss off your father you were game.
You often thought, if I had a mother would it be different? I didn't want my father to tell me about whom my mother used to be just in case she was exactly like him. I imagined my mother as a goddess who was the exact opposite of my father but had all the control: because with a mother like that, I personally wouldn't want to rebel.
All I had was my father. If I stepped a foot out of line at school father would march up to the school and scold me in front of everyone, it was embarrassing. If I stepped a foot out of line at home, let's just say I was confined to my room all summer long.
But he doesn't stop there because he's wants you perfect but you know you're not; you can't be the good little son that he wants.
I was so happy to become first a keeper then a captain on the Slytherin Quidditch team; I was too focused on it that my grades slipped. The school told home and my father got me kicked off the team.
When I got home that summer I climbed out my bedroom window at night, met the local town slut and went on an all-night bender. Father had been furious when I returned the next morning, he lost his temper and he hit out at me.
I had clutched my cheek in shock; I never thought that my father would ever hurt me physically. He had been sorry, deeply apologetic; he was shocked too at what he did.
Things had turned mellow after that but then I feel in love with Narcissa. Father did love her, she was like the perfect child he never had and he to her was like the father she never had.
It pissed me off, she was my girlfriend not his surrogate daughter. When we returned to Hogwarts after a dreadful Christmas, I was told about becoming a death eater.
I jumped at the chance because it felt to me like my father was stealing my girlfriend and this was the biggest rebelling act to date history.
It had been the most stupid mistake of my life. Narcissa found out before my dad and she had been furious at me then, something broke in our relationship right there and then but I, full on rebelling, did not even realise.
I gloated to my father when I returned to home for the Summer Holidays before my seventh year. He just stared at my arm for a full minute before turning to me with a horror-stricken face. "Lucius what have you done? I am so glad your mother was not around to see this, it would have killed her" He had slammed the kitchen door behind him and I fell to the floor in a sobbing mess. My mother was like an angel to me and I had just done the very thing she would have most hated to see if she was alive today.
My father became less strict and more distant towards me and I began to hate it. I saw his strictness as a protection and I had lost that.
That was only the start of the many mistakes I was going to make.
My son Draco started to have night terrors after the war, seventeen and every night he was screaming and sobbing. It had startled me the first time, seeing my tough as nails son like that.
I was never a good father to Draco, not really but that was before.
After was now and my son needed me so I was there for him; I would become the good father I never had been.
I came into his room at every cry, I held him close to me and I comforted him. Sometimes when it was a really bad night I would spend the night with him, I'd try my best to get him back off to sleep with him curled around me for comfort. Then when he did fall asleep I would just watch him and try not to cry.
A month after the war his night terrors stopped and I thought everything was okay which was stupid of me.
I returned home early from work one day so Draco thought that he was at home alone. I walked in on him with a razor blade cutting his arm. And then I saw all the other scars on his arm and kicked myself at how naïve I had been. Why couldn't I see this? Why had I been so relieved that my son was okay and didn't even think that he found ways to cope?
I dropped down beside him and cleaned it up trying to bite back the disgust I felt at myself, that allowed my son to do this to himself. I should have watched out for him more, all my fault.
I had promised time and time over again I would be a better father, I failed as one.
"Draco I'm so sorry" I pulled him to me gently holding him.
"Daddy I can't do this anymore, I can't"
"Hey" I lifted his chin up so I could look him in the eyes. "I'm going to help you okay, I'll be there, god Draco I'll be there" I pulled him even closer to me but gently so that I didn't hurt him.
I rocked him in my lap like you would a baby, it was the comfort that we both needed and we both cried.
He was my son, the only important thing I had left, I wasn't going to give up on him and I would become a proper father to him.