Disclaimer/Author's Note: The Harry Potter series is not my original work; thus, I profit from nothing. The following is strictly for entertainment purposes. Tense & pronoun changes are intentional.
It is neither father's screams nor mother's loud whispers that jar me.
It is not the ceiling I see, staring above, but a replay of the oak coffin slowly lowered into the Earth. It is the Minister shaking, hands gripping either side of the podium he's bent over, voice cracking as he struggles for words fitting enough to express just how talented of an Auror she was and just how fiercely loyal of a friend. It is the sneering brunette pulling her wrist away from mother, again proclaiming her company isn't wanted just as mother has rejected hers for over twenty years.
As a child, you don't know there's something wrong. You are carefree, finding humor in all and eager to create excitement. You don't think twice of being looked after by house elves or a governess. But Hogwarts' corridors teach you a new word …. cousin.
How curiously foreign - so much so that on your first Christmas home since being away from home, you ask your parents what it means. No sooner than mother coughs and excuses herself does father drag you by the collar. "You're special, Draco. Put such foolishness out of your mind."
Pure-bloods did not multiply for the sake of it. And with mother's only sister lost during childhood, I was simply out of luck. Not everyone had cousins, I would grow to learn. But I'd have appreciated someone to talk to, to understand me, to guide me when Dumbledore was expected dead at my hands.
I put it out of my mind for as long as I could … which was until Bellatrix denounced the "brat," the "beast" she'd married and received permission to 'prune' the family tree.
Bellatrix took many things - the piss out of my father, the dignity of my mother, the little remaining pride I had left. Seldom was the day I was not reminded what a failure I was, what a travesty indeed for the last son of the Black bloodline to be another inconceivably spineless Malfoy.
But as I knelt beside Nymphadora's body, among the rubble of the Great Hall, her chocolate eyes were so similar to Bellatrix's own I could not shield myself from the cold chill that numbed my limbs.
Bellatrix was dead too, of course, still smiling. She was always smiling …
The war was a storm that not only gutted my arrogance, it made me paranoid and flustered, ready to defend against inevitable streams of hexes and curses.
It killed blood.
Blood.
Hers had been in no way, shape, form or fashion purer than mine but she had been blood nonetheless.
My blood, sprayed over the debris...
And that's when it really hit me that blood truly mattered in this cold world – no, not blood as in cleanliness but blood as in kindred.
The storm brought many hard lessons, none more fundamental than although the Malfoy fortune might buy a lot of things, family is one of the few it could not.
Fin.