January 19, 2048
Draco ran a hand over his jaw, feeling the roughness of stubble he had come to admit was finally entirely gray, and he sighed. His breath curled visibly in lazy puffs; the old house held no heat. Upon stepping over the threshold, he had been seized by such a chill that he mused even London's January snows offered more warmth than the house of his ancestors. He wondered if perhaps the very heart of Number 12, Grimmauld Place was made of ice. Or if in the case it proved that the house did not posses a heart, someplace deep in the bowels of that mass of brick and plaster simply oozed a bitter cold.
And then he shook the thought away.
But now as he stood before his family's greatest pride - or greatest shame depending upon whom you asked - he couldn't help but wonder... Perhaps the ice was not in the heart of the home, but in that of its many inhabitants. A frigid legacy passed from generation to generation that left their souls black with frostbite.
Black souls for the Black family.
How very fitting.
The branches of his family tree twisted and merged and climbed ever onwards in an ugly snarl across the tapestry. He wondered about the stories that lay between the threads of that monstrosity - some of them he knew, most of them would remain mysteries until perhaps the end of time. That was something Blacks had always excelled in - secrets. While some families had skeletons in their closets, the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black had entire graveyards. He may have been a Black in no more than blood, but he knew what it was like to keep the sort of secrets his family had been so fond of.
The kind that rotted you from the inside out.
But he would be the last to have inherited that particular tradition.
He raised a hand in front of him - when had his hands become so old and frail looking? - and traced over his name on the tapestry. Draco Malfoy. He wasn't even a real Black, but he was all there was left. Somewhere Black blood ran through the veins of members of the other old families, but it was long-since diluted to a state far more removed than Draco's. His Aunt Andromeda's grandson, Teddy, was too many generations out to count; he wasn't even on the tapestry anyway.
And Draco's line offered no heirs. Not since...not since the accident. The accident that stole his wife and son.
And there it was: two unassuming dates magically embroidered beneath his son's name. Scorpius Malfoy, 2006 - 2029.
So young.
His hands shook at the reminder of the loss of his family. But it was an old hurt, many years buried. If one could bury that sort of pain.
He stepped back several paces, a heavy weight settling over him like some suffocating blanket as more of the tapestry entered his field of vision. And further and further he retreated until his back was pressed against the door to the room that he had shut behind him upon his entry - perhaps in some fleeting, subconscious attempt to keep the poison of that room from getting out and infecting anything else. The House of Black had done enough damage.
Like a puppet freed from its strings, he slid down the length of the door, his fine robes catching at the splintering wood, and sunk to a seat on the filthy, dusty floor despite the protesting from his wearied joints and limbs.
From his new vantage point he could see the whole expanse of it. There was the branch back where a daughter of a Great Aunt Belvina married into the Malfoy family, only to have that particular line reconnect with Narcissa and Lucius. His parents. How many times over were they related?
No wonder there was such madness in the roots of that tree. That's what some would say, at least. That at some point Toujours Pur had gone too far, and the Black family had cursed itself with madness and instability as payment for its fanaticism. Draco thought that the blame rested with different curses altogether. The Dark curses that took more from the caster than they offered - Dark Magic was a cruel mistress. Or perhaps it was the curse of pride. The House of Black had once been at the pinnacle of Wizarding society, practically royalty at some point long before his birth. It had taken him the better part of his life to learn it, but that kind of pride and entitlement was a poison of its own.
And how poisoned the tree had become. The tapestry was a mess of gnarled branches that looked sickly even in thread and scattered burn marks like some terrible parasite. He thought those burn marks lucky. But after him, no one would feel the burden of seeing their name upon that tapestry ever again. He was the last person alive to be embroidered up there among the branches.
And he lived every day with the knowledge that while he went about his business, deep in the recesses of a house forgotten by the Black descendents and Harry Potter himself, his name would mock him from its place there until the day he died.
Draco leaned his head back against the wood of the door and let his eyes slide mercifully shut for only a second. He was so very very tired. It was not the exhaustion of a sleepless night, but a weariness that echoed in the spaces between his bones.
With a start, he realized that the shadows had grown long and the light filtering through the dirty panes of the solitary window was weak and pale, like tea with too much milk. His breath still curled in visible puffs before him, and the tips of his fingers had gone numb from the cold.
He heaved himself to his feet with the help of his father's walking stick. He didn't know why he still kept the relic - for that's what it was, a relic of times better left forgotten. His father had left it behind when he'd been locked up in Azkaban after the war, and he had bequeathed it to Draco. Young and impressionable as he still was, he had been honored to look after his father's beloved possession. But the gift had gained a bitter edge when Lucius never returned from prison to reclaim it.
Draco ran his hand over the smooth silver of the snake's head - a symbol of a legacy that had once made him proud, but now only left him...empty. As if in slow motion, his fingers opened and the walking stick fell. It tipped, the heavy weight of the snake driving downwards the fastest, until it clattered noisily to the ground.
He flexed his empty fingers experimentally before approaching the tapestry once more.
He walked along the length of it, tracing the branches and names with his fingertips. Sirius, Phineas, Elladora, Arcturus, Lycoris, Cassiopeia, Callidora, Lucretia, Cygnus, Bellatrix, Narcissa...Draco.
Draco.
Draco Malfoy. Who was he? A man, once a boy, who carried a heart filled with the impressions of loss and so many mistakes? The last apple on a poison tree?
What an end to such a grand legacy he was.
But he didn't want to be the last of a legacy. He didn't want to be the last Malfoy, and he didn't want to be the last Black.
He didn't want to be a relic.
With steady fingers, he withdrew his wand from the folds of his robes. The weight of it was familiar, having been his almost constant companion since he was eleven. When Potter had returned it after the Dark Lord fell, Draco had found himself surprisingly reluctant to put it to use again. The curses that had fallen from his lips with that wand in his hands...
The wand chooses the wizard...
But the wizard makes the wand.
That's what old Ollivander told him when he had attempted to purchase a new one. And so with the stubborn tenacity Draco had been so adept at in his youth, he made the wand his again. He gave it new life. And now the wand had a new history; it was no longer marked by the deeds it had once helped him perform.
He raised his wand, leveling it at his name on the tapestry.
He didn't need an incantation. The energy just flowed from within him - fueled by the place deep inside that resented the legacy that hung about his neck, his own personal albatross - and left the tip of the wand in a stream of flame and sparks.
With a gasp, he lowered his wand arm, and his eyes widened at what he had done. And then he felt it. Light. He was lighter. He wasn't an heir, he wasn't a legacy, he was not his history.
Draco Malfoy was nothing but a burn mark on the twisted map of pain and sins and loss of the House of Black.
With the slightest of smiles twitching at the edge of his lips, he turned on his heel and left the room.
Draco closed the door behind him, knowing that it would never again be opened by someone that would truly understand the burden of what adorned those walls.
He left behind only a walking stick with a snake head pommel and a line of footprints in the dust.