My dear son, it is six o'clock in the morning in Malfoy Manor. You are asleep cradled in my left arm and I am learning the art of one handed writing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I've ever known her, is sound asleep in her bedroom and there is a soft quiet in the Manor.
Since you've arrived, days have melted into nights and back again and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks are feeding and winding and nappy changing and these occasional moments of quiet.
When you're older we'll tell you that you were born into the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black, and that Mrs Blacks horrid portrait in Grimmauld Place smiled the first time since being painted when she saw you. "A beautiful boy." She murmured "We Blacks love the boys." A positive sign, I think.
Naturally your mother and I were only too happy to believe that. We had wanted you and waited for you, imagined you and dreamed about you and now that you are here no dream can do justice to you. Outside the window, below is in the garden, the garden elves are tending to the flowers. I can see the trail of a fishes tail in the lake and, somewhere out there, the last stars are flickering towards the other side of the world.
We have called you Scorpius Hyperion but I've been told by my friends you should have another name too, just for you, and this glorious dawn sky makes me think we'll call you Son of the Stars. So that later, when you and I are far from here, perhaps standing on a beach some evening, I can point at the sky and tell you of your name and the stars and all the people we knew when you were young.
Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed essential to me has, in the past few days, taken on a different colour. Like many people I know, I have lived a life that, on occasion, has veered close to the edge: war zones, dictators, darkness in all its shapes and forms.
In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could have ever thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life.
And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory, suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across in my life. To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much to bear at this moment to even think of children being hurt and abused and killed. And yet, looking at you, the images come flooding back. A ten-year-old muggle, Sarah Hill dying from fiendfyre burns outside her home in Wiltshire, how her voice cried out, growing ever more faint when the wind blew dust on to her wounds. The two brothers, Daniel and John, in Preston. John, two years old and nearly blind, dying from the pain of the cruciatus curse, being carried on seven-year-old Daniel's back. And Daniel's words to me, "He was nice before, but then they came."
Last October, in Scotland, when you were growing inside your mother, I met Sandy, aged twelve. Motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins of her home, everything was gone, she told me. And I knew that, for all her tender years, she had learned more about loss than I would likely understand in a lifetime.
There is one last memory, of Devon, and the school where, in a ransacked classroom, I found a mother and her three young children huddled together where they'd been beaten to death. The children had died holding on to their mother, that instinct we all learn from birth and in one way or another cling to until we die.
Scorpius, these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for you, the tenderness and the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything happening to you. But there is something more, a story from long ago that I will tell you face to face, father and son, when you are older. It's a very personal story but it's part of the picture. It has to do with the long lines of blood and family, about our lives and how we can get lost in them and, if we're lucky, find our way out again into the sunlight.
It begins thirty-five years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on the ground and a woman walking to the hospital to have her first baby. She is in her early twenties and the city is still strange to her, bigger and noisier than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant home. She's walking because she cannot floo and her husband is too busy in a meeting with a mysterious dark lord to take her.
On the way, a taxi driver notices her sitting, exhausted and cold, in the doorway of a shop and he takes her to hospital for free. Later that day, she gives birth to a baby boy and, just as you are to me, he is the best thing she has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weeps with joy when he sees his son. He is truly happy. In his own way, for they were both young and in love with each other and their son.
But, Scorpius, time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of the dark lord ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to do, it just was. When you are older, my son, you will learn about how complicated life becomes, how we can lose our way and how people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up, the man lived away from his family, on his own in the wizarding prison, living for the deceased dark lord.
He died on the fifth of January, one day before the anniversary of his son's birth, all those years before in that snowbound city. But his son was too far away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might have wished to say to one another were left unspoken.
Yet now, Scorpius, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry in the delivery room of St. Mungo's Hospital and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather and, foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear, across the infinity between the living and the dead, your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognize the distinct voice of family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that you and all your innocence and freshness have brought to the world.
Your father,
Draco Malfoy
a/n: please review