Present Day 2008

Draco wipes the wet plates clean and puts them in their stand. He takes his gloves off and places a glass of milk for her while Athena hums some tune she heard on the telly the other day. She has a pleasant voice and Draco wonders if he should send his mother another video. She always cheered up his mother. Well, who couldn't find themselves cheered up by her presence?

"Can we go to the movies tonight?" Athena asks, her eyes widening in an effort to manipulate her father to bend to her will. She is quite the Slytherin. Draco cannot help but smirk at the thought.

"Finish your milk," Draco says sternly, throwing a glare over his shoulder for good measure. He can hear her pout and groan but the sound of milk being chugged down soon follows and he smiles to himself. He puts his plate on the table and sits down to eat, silently waiting for Athena to begin with her questions.

"Daddy, why doesn't the colour of my skin match yours?" she asks, as she always does. Draco opens his mouth to give out the same perfunctory reply he always makes when asked this question but she interrupts him, "don't give me the fairy tale version of it. I'm a big girl, I can handle it," she sits up straight and her clear brown eyes peer into his grey ones. Draco purses his lips. Unlike other times when Athena could be cajoled with other versions, this time there seems to be a dangerous passion around her. She looks like she won't be satisfied with half-truths. And Draco has made his life on half-truths, survived a war on half-truths.

"Athena," he says quietly but shuts up. He doesn't know what to say to her and how to say it. "Can we please wait till the weekend? I'll tell you then."

"No, I want to know now," Athena shouts. "Everybody in school is the same colour as their parents, and also, where is my mom? I want a mom too!" Athena cries, her lips pressing into a thin line. Draco can see she is on the verge of tears and his heart clenches.

"Do you not like your skin?" he asks, instead.

"I want to be like you."

He wants to tell her No, no, no. She shouldn't ever, ever want to be like him. His daughter is pure and he is not. He wants her to be nothing like him.

"I want to look like you and grandma," she crosses her pudgy arms across her chest. He wants to tell her something that would matter, something that would make sense. But he can't so he just stares at her tiredly until Athena finally stops glaring. She seems to sense her father's helplessness and Draco is surprised when she hugs him.

"So I guess we'll be going to the movies tonight?" She says, smirking slightly. Draco is incredulous and proud of his little Slytherin child.

Year 2000

When Azkaban allows one Draco Malfoy back into society, it is not the society of his choice, and definitely not in a situation of his choice. His magic is taken away from him, though is allowed to use owls to send his mother letters and such. Everything else, however, is taken away from him.

His home, his friends, his life, his magic –sometimes when Draco is not completely awake and is suspended in the delicious space of lucidity and sleep, he can almost feel his body hum with magic. He can feel it zing in his bones. They can never really divorce him from it and he finds some solace in that. In situations of panic and eventual outburst, Draco founds himself always reaching for his pant pockets only to have his fingers grasp at air. He is frightened and alone. He wants to go home and when his mother calls him her baby, he realizes he is anything but. He decides he has had a good enough childhood and does not deserve more of it; does not deserve to ask to be taken care. He has deprived so many parents of their children; so many children of their childhood. He cannot complain anymore.

He starts reading books on wandless magic though he knows he can only exercise it in small amounts, the tracker the Ministry put on him will be notified if the amount of magic in his vicinity is more than the regulated amount owing to presence of magical objects in his home. Even his clothes from the Manor emitted some magic of their own – for after all, they were not of this world. The Ministry tried to take away this right from Draco too but his mother fought tooth-and-nail for him to at least have the decency to hold magic, if not exercise it.

The owl, the letters, the books, and other artefacts Draco has in his house produce a magical field sufficient for Draco to disguise his magic as part of the objects'. He can make objects move wandlessly but it is still a long time before he is able to make them yield to him completely. The first time he succeeds is when he loads the dishwasher and switches it on without any physical effort.

Draco Malfoy has known poverty but not like the one he sees when he arrives in this village. He studies engineering at a nearby city and the commute takes him six hours back and forth. He sees the trees, and the animals, as if for the first time. He sees the people, as if for the first time. Being removed from his family and his manor...Draco Malfoy finally finds a space to be himself. He is not sure of what he is, or who he is. He neither muggle, nor wizard, nor squib. He is human...and wonders if that is enough. Draco Malfoy finds that every day he hates himself a little. He is not sure how this has come along, but he is glad. Most evenings are spent learning how to cook against the sound of his father's old American jazz records crooning through the gramophone.

The first time they found the muggle records, Draco and Narcissa Malfoy had been stunned. Lucius Malfoy's private study had several wards and secret cabinets hidden along the walls - which when broken into revealed a voluminous collection of muggle books and other novelties. The initial shock is followed by with hatred and mistrust. Draco had, upon his father's arrest and eventual death in captivity, come to conclude and understand that his father was bigoted racist sycophant who loved his family very much and because of his unfortunate opinions made decisions that didn't bode him and his family well.

Draco had understood this contradiction that lay in his father. But at this discovery of muggle inventory, Draco is angry and confused and – so, so tired. He does not understand how his father could've brought Draco up the way he had, with the notions he had instilled in him, while pursuing muggle culture in secret. He does not understand, and it is a long time before Draco realizes he does not need to understand his father in order to still be capable of loving him. Draco understands he cannot understand everything or everyone - he cannot even understand himself, for that matter, and with that, Draco finds he also hates his father less; accepts him more, understands him more, and eventually, forgives him.

He initiates a bridge construction project when he finishes his education. The villagers are wary of him initially but soon grow to accept him...if not completely like him.

There is a fire one day and there is only one noise: of a baby. Draco Malfoy finds himself with an orphan and he wonders how he is to love and parent a kid when he knows and remembers none. When the baby clutches at his breast desperately, trying to look for a nipple to suckle at, Draco finds he is confused and angry. Angry for what had happened to the baby – confused, at what the baby wanted. He calls his mother, asks him to visit her. His first mistake. He didn't plan on adopting the baby at all – but there was no one there. No one left. What could he have done? He was so tired of blood and war and death. He wanted life.

But even before Draco Malfoy can wonder if he is a good enough parent, there is an entire court case opened by the Wizengamot to determine it for him. The newspapers are just like he remembers them to be: loud, rude and precise.

Former Death Eater vying for muggle Fatherhood?

Former Death Eater Draco Malfoy a fit parent?

'Death Eaters and Diabolical Diapers' - Special piece by Rita Skeeter

"Don't listen to what they say," he hears someone say from behind him. It's Potter. After an entire fortnight of sleepless nights because the baby, refuses to sleep, Draco is too tired to conjure up a response. He is too tired for anger or for hate. He has been tired of it for a while now, he realizes. He looks at Potter and wonder how this boy – now, a man, managed to get out of the bed every morning after leading the life he had lead. All those years spent in terror – how does he do it? How had he done it before? He wants to ask, unknown to him that Harry Potter wonders the same about him.

"I think, erm – you'll be great, you know," Potter says in that stupid awkward Potter way. Draco remains silent. He doesn't know how to respond to kindness yet. He is still learning. He does not know how to respond to Potter, especially.

Stupid, awkward, brave Potter who never really had a normal life and didn't really like the limelight he was placed in now. He remembers his mother telling last month of a fight Potter had gotten into with the paparazzi and complaining about how he was let "off the hook, way too easily" and it was so "because he is the Golden Boy" and Draco had begrudged him in that moment, begrudges his privileges, his life, had wanted to punch the wall and punch Potter, though even in that moment Draco knew he'd be hung for it, but now that he sees Potter in front of him, living, breathing, he remembers the fights, the crap Potter was put through and Draco feels relieved that he is not Harry Potter. He is not the Boy-Who-Lived and Boy-Who-Was-Forced-To-Save-Everyone – Draco is so, so, relieved because he knows his cowardly heart could not have summed up the courage to rise up to the challenge even if it was prophesied by Merlin himself.

Potter clears his throat and Draco is forced to think about what Potter has just said. He honestly does not know what kind of a parent he would be. What he does know is that he had stopped referring to the baby as 'the baby' and started referring to it as 'my baby.' He had started waking up at the slightest whimper of his daughter. She is a girl, a girl with a pair of strong lungs which she intended to use every time Draco closed his eyes.

"I have a daughter," Draco says softly, marvelling at the fact. Nobody can take it away from him, he realizes. They can call him names but they cannot take away the nights he had spent cooing to his daughter, the afternoons he had spent pressing a wet cloth against the baby's mouth; let her tug at his hair, let her vomit on him. Nobody could take away the fatherhood from him. "I have a daughter," Draco says, firmly now. Potter is looking at him with a strange look. Draco Malfoy looks up and smirks, feeling more like him than he has in a decade.

"I hope these imbeciles give their judgement soon – so, I can appeal it, and re-appeal it again, and again," he says, his back straight, eyes closed, and arms crossed over his chest, "I have a daughter to raise and things to do, after all."

Present day 2008

He has no idea what she is doing here and he wonders if she's thinking the same thing. He wonders if he should ask her if she's lost, if she's okay, if he should contact someone on her behalf but finds himself unable to say anything; finds himself capable of only waiting, like she seems to be doing, for something to happen, to shock them out of their inaction. She takes a deep breath and Draco notices the way her mouth contracts into a small wound before setting into a straight line. He wonders if she's going to say something any time soon. He knows he isn't.

"It's nice here," She finally says. She doesn't look at him and Draco isn't sure if the comment is addressed to him. He nods anyway. Her fingers seem restless and it is the first time Draco notices that she isn't wearing a ring. He had learnt of her impending nuptials in the papers but her naked fingers make him think otherwise now. But maybe she is the kind who didn't believe in rings, so he couldn't be sure what to think. He doesn't know her so he can't comment on the kind of person she is.

She is wearing a grey button-down blouse with their sleeves rolled up to the elbows; a silver necklace lies against her neck. Her restless hands finger her form fitting blue jeans at her knees before resting in her lap again. Her eyes are vacant save for a glimmer of spark at times. She looks like a shadow of lazy insanity. They don't say anything for another hour. She mostly stares into the space. He stares at her. He wonders if she knew it was a Friday and he didn't work Friday and through the weekends before she came here. He looks at her and wonders if she is capable of any coherent thought at all.

He had found her two hours ago, when he'd come home from grocery shopping, sitting on the front porch of his house. She hadn't said anything when he had expressed his surprise over her presence. She had just looked at him in a strange scared confused way. He had invited her inside but she had made a vague sound of refusal. He hadn't protested, only taken a seat on the chairs placed out on the porch, a safe distance from where she sat on the stairs.

Two hours from then and now Draco decides he must break whatever spell Granger was ensconced in. He has things to do. Unlike wonder girl, his life hasn't been easy and he cannot humour her any longer. He has to go fetch Athena from school first. But he isn't sure if it would be wise to expose his daughter to a dazed Granger. She doesn't seem to be dangerous, just confused. Draco still isn't comfortable with the thought of Athena coming home to a misty-eyed stranger sitting on their doorstep.

"Granger," Draco says, giving her a cautious nudge on the shoulder, "you need to leave. My daughter will be home soon."

In the past two hours, it is the first time Granger moves as if aware of her body and existence, her eyes focus on him and her pupils expand. Her mind seems to slowly register him, and the situation. She closes her eyes, purses her lips and releases a deep breath. She opens her eyes and stands up. Draco somehow feels it took a massive effort to perform all those actions.

"Of course, Athena, right? I've heard of her. Heard she's lovely. I was told she's tiny, and she –," Granger is now muttering unintelligibly. After a few barely coherent sentences, her mutterings become completely incoherent and Draco finds himself standing there awkwardly waiting for Granger to realize that he's waiting for her to leave. It takes another ten minutes before Hermione Granger is all caught up and blushes profusely when the realization dawns on her.

"Can I ...Can I not stay for a little while longer? I promise not to do anything bizarre. I just…," her arms wound around her torso, and her eyes search the floor for words. Draco understands her perfectly. He knows exactly what she wants and he knows he can give it to her. But he doesn't know what it would mean and what it would entail in the future. He doesn't understand why she's here. He isn't sure of the commitment, he isn't sure he's the right person for this. He isn't sure if he wants to take up what would definitely grow to be a huge responsibility with Athena around. He isn't sure of one goddamned thing.

"Just another hour?" Granger's eyes are glistening with unshed tears, she is pleading. He still doesn't understand why she's here. Why isn't she with Weasely or Potter or her muggle parents, or her muggle friends—if she had any. He doesn't understand why she's come to him.

He wonders about her friends, family, her engagement—what had happened to her? He wonders if Granger likes Indian food because that is what he has made for lunch. Athena had declared herself a vegetarian a week ago, and in a supportive gesture Draco now humoured her by cooking vegetarian meals from different cuisines. Fridays is Indian.

"Alright, come on in," he says as he opens the door.