Pureblood or None
We must not have been very old, maybe 14 and 12, when I felt his dark eyes watching me first. At first, I chalked it up to hero-worship—can you blame anyone for looking up to a Malfoy? Certainly not. And neither can you blame anyone for crushing on one.
He amused me. There was really no other way to say it. I was both fascinated and perplexed. He was royalty and commoner mixed in one. It was as if the walls of his upbringing, his poverty, could not stamp out his true self—a prince. That was his little nickname. The Half-Blood Prince.
Never did I think I would associate with a piss-poor half-blood. Then again, we can never say for sure where life will take us.
No one in our whole house knew, knows, or ever will know as many dark spells in their time at Hogwarts. His mother was adamant about teaching him curses. She is still very fond of curses—just try maiming a book from Hogwarts' library and you'll see what I mean.
There was almost nothing he didn't accept about himself. He accepted his dark past and his house and allowed both to guide him where others, such as Sirius and Regulus Black, my wife's cousins, failed, each at one, respectfully. No, my friend was a cut above everyone else.
The only thing he did not like about himself was his body. Sometimes I suspected he wished he was a ghost or something similarly incorporeal. One day I was sitting with him in the library. Despite being two years his senior, I was the student and he was the tutor. So very clever my boy is, yes. Typically, there had been someone else with us. But for this session, we were scandalously alone.
I smiled at him while he was explaining something, and he flushed furiously and stumbled upon his words. I will not lie; this was a reaction that I loved most sincerely. I am not a man to play silly games, so I asked him outright, uncaring that we were not the only two in the library. "Excuse me, Mister Tutor, but I have a question to ask. Will you be able to pull your head from your books and your cauldrons for a few hours on Hogsmeade weekend, or am I going to have to date myself? I had rather thought I was above that." And then came the final step, a challenging glint to the eye along with a serious expression.
My request gave him pause, and he looked away, absently chewing at his quill. Then he looked up, ink-stained teeth and all, and grinned for probably the second time in his four years at Hogwarts. "I rather think you're above that too," he murmured quietly.
"Splendid," I said. "And your birthday's coming up, so I may have to buy you something."
"I don't need your charity," he started, but I cut him off.
"A Malfoy is generous, not charitable. Though, I consider you a worthy cause either way. Now, back to spell theory, Mister Tutor." I smiled quickly, and then looked back down at the page of the book in front of us. He scooted his chair a little closer to mine.
For the next few years, even after I had left Hogwarts, he was my world. That world widened to include my wife, Narcissa Black-Malfoy. When the marriage was first decided upon, I nearly wanted to kill myself, but I'm used to her now. It's not that she's horrid—in fact, she's quite grand. It's the fact that my lover and I had been an illusory attempt at finding someone. But the break-up still stung.
I had known it was pureblood or nothing, and nothing was never an option. In my mother's words, the relationship between the two of us had been uncivilized. And I had the thought: Who needed culture and civilization when they could have Severus?
