This was written for Morphy's TriWriter Tournament - Part One :

"As the first Challenge of this Unreal Tournament. You must write a series of events throughout a Character's life with each category included in order to see who is flexible and gets along well with changes and several types of feelings on one flowing go, the categories are examples that you can change according to the moments in the Character's life, but all of these must be in the Fic.

Birth, Growing up (Humor/Friendship), finding Love (Romance), Life (General(Action/Adventure, etc)/Family), Loss (Angst/Hurt/Comfort), and eventual Death (Tragedy (and Horror/Crime/Western/Sci-Fi, depending on the type of death))."

I'm aspiring to become the Beaux-Bâtons champion. I hope I met all the requirements.

Thanks MinionsOfTheNachoArmyUnite for beta-reading it so fast!

Astoria Greengrass' birth had been a miracle. Well, not the birth, per se, but the fact that she survived.

Her mother had delivered her three months early, and Astoria looked more like a little shrimp than a baby. The doctors said she would not survive the first week, but, somehow, she had.

Her appearance had testimonied that early birth; she was tiny and always seemed very fragile. Everyone protected her because of it, and she played around with that fact.

Astoria, as a kid, was spoiled. She could do whatever she wanted, and she would never be punished. Normally, during those events, the girls wore their nicest dresses and acted like small women to impress their possible future in-laws. It was never too early to be in the good grace of other purebloods.

But Astoria was the 'chouchou' and could do what she wanted. She wore her common robes and played with her toy broom, and no one really even minded. "Poor little girl," they would say. She seemed so breakable that they just couldn't reprimand her!

On one such occasion, she played in the garden, running and hiding behind the trees, when the other kids were playing quietly inside the house. After a few moments of playing alone, she hurt herself by falling into a stinging plant, and, crying, went inside to the playroom with the other kids.

Her hand was red and swollen, and it hurt so much . The kids were not paying attention to her, except for one: Draco Malfoy.

He approached her and said: "If you had just stayed in here, you would not be hurt."

She looked at him with her best six-year-old 'mean' stare. He seemed to be the most annoying of all the children there. He just sat there and criticized everything.

"Give me your hand," he commanded.

She hid it behind her back, defying him with her eyes to try a move on her.

"Fine. You don't want my help, I don't care, but if the plant was a minjus..." he let his words hang in the air, frightening her. She looked at the smart eight-year-old boy with wide eyes. And, finally, she showed him her hand.

After examining it, just for show, he guided her to the garden. He took some leaves and crushed them together, and a greenish liquid leaked onto his hands. Gently, he took her hand and applied the liquid onto it.

"Thanks," Astoria muttered, and he left her in the garden. Her hand wasn't itchy anymore. It was probably just the placebo effect, but at the time, Astoria didn't care. Draco Malfoy had cured her hand, she owed him.

The occasion for her to repay him showed ten years later with the Battle of Hogwarts. Death Eaters were attacking the place and most of the students had been evacuated, but her sister was nowhere to be found. Astoria was worried. She came back in the castle to look for Daphne.

She was running through the corridors, wand in hand. Even though she wore a green tie, the opponents would not be kind to her. The spells were flying in some places, but she managed to avoid the dangerous corridors. Daphne had probably been on the seventh floor with Adrian and didn't hear the alert. It was highly improbable, but Astoria could only thinkof that when she hadn't seen her sister in the Great Hall with the others when they launched the evacuation.

She made her way toward the seventh floor, to her sister's regular snogging spot. She had to be there, she had to be safe and silly enough to snog her boyfriend when she should have left the castle!

Astoria didn't meet a lot of students, only three or four at most, running and yelling at her to leave the castle. She was a staircase away from her sister's spot when she saw Draco fighting with a Death Eater. She didn't hesitate and casted, by surprise, a spell at the masked man. He hit the floor and Draco quickly disarmed and tied him.

Astoria felt her arm grabbed by her friend and started running with him toward a safer place.

"You need to evacuate!" he yelled at her. "You are crazy to still be in this castle!"

"Well, if I hadn't been here, you'd be dead right now!" she whispered loudly.

"Evacuate, now!" He copied her lower tone.

"I have to find Daphne first! She was not in the Great Hall!"

"I... I will find her and send her to the exit. Now go! Please." He let go her arm and gestured toward the Room of Requirement where the evacuation was being held.

With one last look toward him, she ran. She arrived to her destination without crossing the path of a Death Eater, or her sister for that matter. Her parents, who had been alerted, were waiting for her.

"Where's Daphne?" inquired her mother while holding her safe daughter.

"I... I don't know! Dr..Draco is going to find her," she said with a determined voice. With a last look at her mother's scared eyes, she began to sob.

The end of the battle came slowly for the Greengrass family, as Daphne had not come back. Her father even went to the castle, but he had not come back either. As soon as the victory was proclaimed, the two women rushed to the castle.

The scene before Astoria's eyes was, in a word, indescribable. People were crying, people were laughing, people were dead. She dreaded to believe her sister could be one of those dead bodies. It just couldn't be.

She detached herself from her mother when she saw Draco and his parents.

"Where is my sister?" she asked as soon as she reached him. Her friend seemed broken and was deadly pale, but she could only think of her sister. He closed his eyes, pain on his face. She knew what it meant. Before she could process the death of her sister, she felt him hugging her.

And she cried out all of the tears in her body. Her surroundings were blurry, her only anchor being Draco's shirt.

It was at this moment that their Slytherin friendship became a real friendship. The end of the war had been hard for both of them; the time was depressing between trials and funerals. And those two had stayed close.

Astoria had her sister, but now she was gone and she was alone. She stuck with her friend, Draco. It took over a year for their friendship to become a little more. A year without laughs, a year with shared pain and distress.

It was Draco's second birthday after the battle. Unlike the first one, it happened outside the court, and both of his parents were free.

The party was grand, as was expected. Every British wizard had been invited. Purebloods needed to reclaim their status in Wizarding society, and parties like this one were a good start.

The rush of the party ended toward eleven PM. It was early for a nineteen-year-old birthday party, but convenient for a social gathering.

Astoria found Draco in the gift room; the amount of gifts he received was probably ridiculously low compared to the other years.

"Is that all you received?" she asked.

"Yes, but I hadn't seen yours yet..."

"Oh, it's because I wanted to give it to you personally," she explained, and gave him a rare potions book wrapped in green paper. He opened it and thanked her.

"I have another gift, though." She called to the house elf, who brought them a cake and a white wrapped gift.

He looked surprised at the small chocolate cake with a single candle on it.

"It's for your new start in life. Now that everything is fine, I thought you could celebrate it and mark this day as the beginning of your new life," she explained.

Draco opened the gift to find a frame with a picture of his parents and him the day they were proclaimed innocent. Without any warning, he kissed her, and she kissed back.

The fifth of June of the year Two Thousand was the anniversary of Draco's birth, and Draco and Astoria's new start in life.

It was a special day for them then, and it always would be.

......

"You can't possibly be 'grumpy.' And don't you want to go on our date for our eight-year anniversary?" Draco asked to his wife. "Do I need to remind you that it's my birthday, too, and it's supposed to be a special day and I'm at the center of that day. If I say we'll go out, we'll go out." His attempt at an authoritative tone sounded more like a child complaining and made Astoria laugh.

"Do I need to remind you that I'm eight months pregnant and I don't feel like going out when I look this horrible? And I've felt sick all day."

"It's okay if you look horrible, you're pregnant and people will look at me anyway," he answered with his trademark smirk.

"Argh!"

"What? I was only joking, love!"

"No, it was... it...I think it.. argh!! It was a contraction!"

Before she could say another word, he called for the house elf and flooed them to St Mungos. He yelled to the nurse that his wife was giving birth and that it was their new priority. He looked mad and worried at witnessing Astoria's pain.

She took them to a room and the doctor visited them. Luckily, it was a false alert: Astoria just had a fat indigestion. But, she still had to stay over night.

"I think it was the worst birthday I ever had. And that includes the one directly after the war," Draco said seriously.

"I can't believe you! I was the one in pain because I'm bearing your child!" she snapped him before he could add another word.

"Let me finish please, love." He looked at her and continued, "It's the worst birthday ever, but I think it could have been the best day of my life if we had our baby today." He walked toward the bed and lied down next to her. "I love you, Astoria."

"I love you, too." With those words she drifted to sleep, her husband next to her. He had his own way to say and express things, but she always understood him anyway.

They welcomed the baby two weeks later, both were ecstatic with the new born child. They had grumbled at night when he hadn't allowed them to sleep. He had worried them to death when he got his first serious injury with his toy broom. Scorpius was the tempo of their life, but they still thought it missed something.

They wanted another child, a child they couldn't have. The doctor explained to them that Scorpius would be the only child they could have when he was six years old. She had cried and, like all the other times, her anchor was Draco.

Ha was probably not the best husband or best friend she could have had, but he was her best anchor to this world. Scorpius was her anchor too, she loved him immensely, but he was not Draco.

Scorpius would live his life and metaphorically abandon her for a wife and kids. Scorpius would start a life on his own.

Draco, in the other hand, would never abandon her. Her anchor would stick with her until the end of their life. Not her life, their life : the one they started on the fifth of June in the year Two Thousand.

The life that had ended the eighteenth of August Two Thousand and Fifty Four with Draco's death.