A/N Well, I'm going to try this again and hope for a good response. This is my story from It will be...um, watered down a bit for little eyes. I'm not going to be a btch about reviews, but if you read my story and have an opinion, they are appreciated. Thanks to my beta, Megan. I'm relatively new to the workings of this site, so if I cross any lines of decency, please let me know and it will altered accordingly.

DISCLAIMER: It's all JKR's except my own character. Everything else is hers and I curse that fact daily. That applies to all chapters. In addition, I make no money from this. All hail the great JKR...

THE DRAGON'S CHILD BRIDE

Chapter 1: Can't Escape the Memories

Lucius Malfoy was in a foul mood. Not to say he was ever very pleasant, but this indeed was what he would call a foul mood by personal standards. He needed to get out, if only for a few minutes, to get away from Narcissa's mindless complaining. Despite the cool and collected front she showed at her many parties and what other social gatherings, when not in the public eye, Narcissa was downright bitchy.

'A walk,' he thought to himself, ' a walk around the grounds should clear my head.' He was just putting on a jacket to fight off the late October chill when Narcissa came around the corner.

"And where are you going?" she asked with a clearly false air of pleasantry. Lucius sighed. Why did she have to be so damned nosy all the time?

"For a walk around the grounds" he mumbled. Narcissa clapped her hands together and smiled brightly.

"O, that's a lovely idea! A walk around the grounds, just the two of us. I'll get my coat." Before he could utter a word of protest, she was up the stairs to fetch one of her many coats. There was no way out of it. Lucius' walk of escapism would now be in the company of the only one he wanted to escape.

He waited for a full ten minutes at the bottom of the stairs while she tried on jacket after jacket, trying judge which one worked best as a 'I'm-walking-with-my-husband' coat. He didn't bother to yell at her to hurry up. That would only incite her to come out of the bedroom to yell, then proceed to ask him if he liked the coat she was currently wearing. No matter what he said she would proceed to model all her coats one by one. If he actually wanted to get outside, Lucius knew that he would have to be patient.

She finally came down the stairs wearing a waist length red zip-up jacket. Despite how much he could loathe Narcissa sometimes, she truly was beautiful. In the back of Lucius' mind, he knew at some level she was a trophy wife. A bit more beauty then brains perhaps, but he chalked it all up to the circumstance and all those things that were beyond his control. Really, he hadn't chosen her, his father had when Lucius was too young to find anything attractive in the fairer sex. He had no other choice than to marry his chosen bride.

Choosing a mate for one's child was an old and aristocratic tradition that had been practiced in the Malfoy family for as far back as they could trace their lineage. It made perfect sense. How could one marry into more power, money, and good breeding if one were sidetracked by silly things like love? Yes, it really was better to have the parents choose in these matters. It was a three-fold process. Once the parents had come to an agreement, usually somewhere between the child's birth and 2nd birthday, they would perform the binding spell, pledging to do whatever it took to nurture the children's relationship and raise them to follow in these ways. The second was usually performed at the younger child's sixth birthday. After the children received their wands, they would execute their own binding spell to commit to one another, and from then until the wedding, each would wear a symbol of their union. And the final spell was performed on their wedding day, sealing them together forever.

Their marriage hadn't all been bad. There was a time Lucius and Narcissa truly did love each other, as opposed to tolerating one another like they were doing now. And she had done well by him; she had bore him a son and worthy heir, Draco, and had even provided some connections for that son to profit from. And it was through Narcissa, he had come upon finding Draco a wife for when he was of proper age. She had been nearly perfect in every way…

She was such a darling girl, just a few weeks younger then Draco. Her family, Layla and Jonathan Stanners from the American elite Stanners, were equally as prestigious then the Malfoy family. It was a natural decision. It didn't hurt that the mother's had been best friends since childhood, either. If Lucius hadn't known better, he would have sworn that the two mothers had planned everything out, from the conception to their children's children. He supposed it was one of those women things he would never understand. But fate was with the women, and the decision was made once they knew their babies genders. Their first spell was performed mere hours after the birth of the Stanners daughter Laylani.

If Lucius would have ever wanted a girl, he would have wanted his daughter to be exactly like her. He loved Laylani as much as he did his own child. She was a beautiful girl with a big heart. She seemed to bring out the best in in Draco. He was a very fussy baby until she was introduced to his life. He would cry for hours, nothing would appease him, but once she was put in the crib with him, he would calm down immediately and gurgle with something that sounded a lot like happiness.

Out of all the arranged marriages in the history of the Malfoy's, this one seemed truly meant to be. While they grew up there couldn't have been a happier pair of children. They did everything together, holding hands and laughing. Draco would pick her flowers and taught her to climb trees; in turn Laylani would tell him stories and showed him showed him how to dive in the Malfoy's swimming pool. She was his princess and he was her knight in shining armor.

It was shortly after the second tier of their binding that things went horribly, horribly wrong. Having pledged themselves to one another and their parents pledged to encourage their bond, they had bedrooms at one another's houses to stay in for the overnights which they frequently had. That night in early August at the Stanners seaside cottage was just such a night. The children complained about the heat so much, Jonathan suggested that they camp out in their backyard, to which the kids readily agreed. He transfigured some sheets into a two man tent and a set of sleeping bags. He really saw no need for adult supervision; they were too young to get into serious mischief, and they would only be a two minute walk away from the house. Jonathan set up the tent as the sun went down, set up the sleeping bags and said his goodnights to Draco and Laylani, and zipped up the tent. Somewhere between then and daybreak did it all happen.

Layla was the first to make the discovery. She found Jonathan dead, sprawled on the lawn with his throat slit, and Laylani was gone without a trace. No one was sure what exactly happened. The theory that Lucius, along with the Ministry, chose to believe, the one that seemed most credible, was muggles were the culprits. Lucius was used to having vagrant muggles dig through his trash or try to set up camp on his land from time to time, and once they had even tried to break into his house. He knew they weren't above this. It was decided that what most likely happened was Laylani was outside of the tent and a drifter had attacked her. Jonathan heard the commotion and came to save his little girl only to be killed. The hobo had taken Laylani with him to do god knows what, and probably killed her. They never found her body. The least comforting theory, but for all the information they could gather, the most likely.

No one in those happy little families was ever the same afterwards. Not long after her husband was buried, Layla hung herself. Her suicide note simply said she had no one left to live for, to bury her next to her husband and, god willing, someday her daughter as well she left all her wealth and estate to young Draco, because he was her "only angel left."

After the funeral, Narcissa went into a self-imposed exile from everything. For weeks on end she stayed in her room, doing nothing but sleeping and crying and rarely, eating. Lucius began to renew his alliances with the Dark Lord that he had once given up for the sake of his children in attempts to somehow make peace with what happened by getting revenge on muggles, all muggles. As for Draco, he was all alone. He wasn't allowed to see his mother, and his father's presence was sporadic at best. He was left to himself in a situation he didn't understand. The only thing he knew, that he was told, was that his beloved princess was dead, and every muggle, muggle-lover, and mudblood should pay for it.

Although the Malfoy family eventually moved past that point, they were dysfunctional at best. After those first hard weeks, Narcissa emerged with the false sense of happiness she always wore to that very day, distant as a wife and mother. She would throw herself into elaborate social galas for the observer's sake, trying to make everything as status quo as possible. Lucius was no longer the man who would read stories and play games with his child, but a cold and heartless Death Eater, who was convinced his son should no longer behave as a child, but needed to grow up and fast. Draco conformed to all of this, putting away childhood things, taking on the demure of a grown, and arrogant, man who would coolly be party to his mother's gatherings with little interest.

As for Laylani, Lucius supposed they would never know…

Lucius pulled himself back into the present, mentally scolding himself for bringing up memories of …her. With Narcissa at his side he pulled open the door, trying to think of things to talk about with his wife on their walk and nearly tripped over the unconscious body laying at their feet.