One last time.
Another writing prompt concept- Had I known this would be our last dance, I would have dressed for the occasion.
Got a touch emotional with this one too.
Astoria felt it in her bones. Her time was near. Years had turned to months, weeks and days. It was now down to hours and minutes.
Her beloved son Scorpius was unaware at the Potters. This was her time with her husband. Taking a deep breath, she shuffles her legs to the side of the bed, hands reaching for the post for balance. As she calls for Draco, she gets to her feet. Shuffling to the dresser she runs a brush through her flat, fine and drab bleached hair, taking in her reflection. In her youth her hair was lovely curly and full in a butterscotch tone with caramel highlights, darker and more towards light brown to Daphne's straight honey coloured hair flecked in golden streaks. Her heart shaped face was once full of life and vibrancy. It had become sallow and grey. Her whisky coloured eyes once flecked with amber were dull, her vision slightly smudged and fuzzy around the edges. She kept this from him. The peripherals of her vision had gone, the focus only in the directness in front of her. Glaucoma the muggle doctors called it. Her vision would have gone completely within five years. If only she had that long. Her cheeks had always held a blush, turning rosy at the slightest thing. It no longer done that, stuck to the flat hue it had turned a while ago. Even make up couldn't solve it. Her once full and pouty lips gave her a smile that reached her eyes. She barely had a reason to smile now. A rarity. Her lips had taken on the appearance of a crack in the coast line rather than the pillowy clouds above.
She looked more like her grandmother than a woman of thirty something. Barely middle aged she appeared to be a pensioner. Draco still called her beautiful. Around him she felt beautiful. She felt young. Still loved him like a teen.
His footsteps were closer now, the stairs a familiar gentle and quick rhythm under his feet. She takes a step back, pausing to balance and drinking in her full stature. The nightgown hung loose from her bony shoulders, skirting past her jutting hips. Her knees were knobbly, ankles brittle and clicky. It was her favourite, a lovely cornflower blue silk. She'd worn it on their honeymoon. In those days it clung to her perky and full breasts, the white lace edging framing smooth skin, dipping low enough to make him swallow hard. The tiny straps barely held everything up. It clung to her full hips and thighs; Draco loved grabbing them and her rounded bottom, deft fingers partial to kneading the soft flesh. The smooth material barely covered anything; skimming around mid-thigh, higher if she raised her arms to tangle and knot her fingers in his hair to draw him closer. It was always so soft.
Just standing was draining, she had to see her handsome husband just one last time. To hold him close one last time. To be held in his arms one last time. To commit that scent that was purely him to memory; a musky, woodsy smell with a slight kick of citrus. Draco. Scorpius was similar although the citrus was more florally. She could no longer recall exactly what that smell was but it made her smile.
He enters in a hurry, the door swinging on its hinges. She attempts to calm his hurrying questions, tired of the information overload but reassuring him that she was fine. She had one request; hold her in his arms. His eyes flash with something; stormy to steel and back again. She'd always been smaller than him, tucking under his chin. Her arms wind round his neck, a dull ache meandering through her bones in effort, but that didn't matter. Her head rests against his chest. His heart beats strong and steady. Hers, she knew, was rapid and fleeting and partial to skipping or barely there at all. One of his hands curves round a hip, fully covering it now. The other rests on the base of her back.
Together they sway, slowly rotating around the room. Him taking the weight, the clock hands ticking quicker than they were circling. They used to twirl and spin with quick feet, reeling and dancing and prancing with laughter and breathlessness. She no longer had that energy, hadn't properly in years now, it'd probably be closer to a decade in second thoughts. He never minded. Closing her eyes, she breathes deep, a dull ache in her chest. Draco was a solid being, herself more ghost like. A limbo between the two worlds. Not entirely in this one, or the next either. Too human for the afterlife. Too frail, fragile and hurting for this one.
Draco presses a kiss to her forehead followed by another to her Sahara-like lips. Slate eyes search liquid brown, tucking a strand behind her ear his touch lingering by her lobe. She was tired now, all energy gone. She stumbles in his arms, he holds her steady, long pale fingers clasping her elbows while guiding her back to the bed. Laying her down he hugs her now small frame, tucking the covers around her. He smooths her forehead with a thumb, warm lips pressing a kiss to her head and accepting her request for a muggle made cup of tea.
His footsteps fade down the wooden stairs, the middle step creaking underfoot. Closing her eyes, the peacefulness of the manor descends, the calls of pretentious peacocks long gone. Her mind wanders recalling happy memories.
The first is always the same…
Two blonde cherub-like children race down a stretching lawn in frilly pink dresses. Glowing faces and scuffed shoes. The warm sun beating down as they join their parents in the stony folly for orange juice and Victoria sponge. She always separated the two slices first, smudging the cream and jam so it would spread between the two triangles. It wasn't ladylike, her mother chuckled while her father snickered, hidden behind cups of tea in fine china. Daphne always ended up with cream on her small nose.
The next is her first time at Hogwarts. The overly chatty hat placing her in Slytherin after a slight hesitation towards Hufflepuff. Three quarters of the room had looked at her in scorn, the minority in appreciation. She often wondered how they would have perceived her if she had joined the badger ranks. She'd held up her chin in defiance as much as an eleven-year-old could, reminding herself that ladies did not cry. So much prejudice in the world. Ambitious, not evil.
Days with Draco fleet by. Their first awkward date in Madam Puddifoot's. Her first tense meeting with Narcissa and Lucius. Draco had insisted that she was his not long after. She knew they didn't approve of her nicer views towards those who they deemed below them. Their wonderful engagement in Rome. Their beautiful wedding in the garden of her childhood home in Dorset, the folly encased in sweet scented blossom as they said their vows. A summery, mildly breezy, seaside theme of pastel blues, crisp whites, pale sandy browns featuring windmills, starfish and British beach quirks, simple, sweet and casual; the opposite of most pureblood weddings. Narcissa was too polite to comment on her preference towards a more floral affair.
Starting a family hadn't been easy. Scorpius Hyperion had been born after many attempts and trips to St Mungo's on the Halloween of two thousand and five. A tiny pixie-like thing. All pinched features, downy icy blond hair and eyes that matched his fathers'. Draco's double. An angelic looking blessing who had been rather sickly and constantly ill. The pregnancy had been anything but easy; draining her of energy that was in limited supply. A similar state to her current appearance minus a protruding rounded stomach covered in stretch marks. She'd gone into isolation with Draco, too much in jeopardy to risk anything. She'd recovered mostly, minus the odd fainting spell and migraines.
Scorpius followed in their footsteps in school. The very first day on the platform bombarding him with sweets knowing that kids could be mean. He made friends with Albus on the train. It was nice her sweet, kind and funny but shy and insecure son had a friend. He managed it better than his dad had done with Harry.
She raised him like she wanted to; as much away from the pureblood supremacy like she and Draco had been. Her parents were aristocratic with minor tendencies to the supremacy. Draco without a doubt had it worse than she; his parents were still dancing on the line of the dark side although somehow due to deflecting in the eleventh hour had escaped incarceration. Narcissa and Lucius were just a tad difficult to get along with, her upbringing of manners and etiquette helping her to refrain from lashing out and giving them a piece of her mind.
Her two angelic men. Her family.
She no longer felt anything. As if she was weightlessness, floating. Was finally free of pain.
Draco returns with her tea in her favourite mug. A pale blue larger than usual with white daisies on it; two sugars and milk. The liquid flies as he drops the mug which shatters. Tears prick his eyes as he searches for the rise and fall of her chest with no luck. Her form had morphed into the beautiful days of her youth, as if she was sleeping about a decade ago, like the muggle sleeping princess from the fairy tales.
She'd gone.
Reaching for her hand he presses a kiss to her lips, whispering into the soft afternoon light, "Had I known this would be our last dance, I would have dressed for the occasion. Sleep tight my angel. I love you."