I have no idea why I decided to write this, but I really like fluffy family fics sometimes.
Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the Harry Potter and its characters. I'm only borrowing them for my own use.
Draco Malfoy had always taken great pride in being placed in Slytherin by the Sorting Hat while he was at Hogwarts. It meant that he was ambitious and cunning and he stopped at nothing to get his way. He loved the rivalry that occurred within the House of the Serpent while at the same time enjoying that when facing an opponent from another House all Slytherin stood as one. He admired the way the light from the surface somehow penetrated the deepest waters of the lake when he looked up through the windows in the Common Room. And most of all, he loved the colours silver and green.
Yes, Draco would always be proud that he had at one time worn the snake emblem on his robes. And every Malfoy for generations had been placed in Salazar's House, with no random discrepancies such as when Sirius Black was placed in Gryffindor.
Yet when he considered what traits were expected of a witch or wizard put in Slytherin and then compared those to his son, he thought that perhaps Scorpius was different.
It had started when the boy was five years old and Draco and his wife had taken their son to the zoo. It was true that they could have taken him to Africa or India or wherever in the world they wanted, but Draco himself was slightly curious as to how Muggles operated. The boy had been thrilled at this new adventure, and instead of staying quiet and, more importantly, staying with his parents, he had immediately rushed off into the crowd.
"Scorpius!" he yelled after him, to no avail.
He looked to Astoria for aid, but she was of absolutely no help, choosing to stare at him accusingly as if this were somehow his fault. Even if it were, in the very least she could save it till after they retrieved their wayward son! Heaving a sigh, he ran after Scorpius, trying to keep track of his small blonde head. It was hard, and soon he had lost him altogether. He was certain that his son couldn't have gone far. He began to ask everyone around him if they had caught a glimpse of his son when he heard screaming. He looked up to see people streaming in one direction, shouting excitedly. Rolling his eyes, he joined them, certain that if there were something interesting going on that Scorpius would be heading towards it. Eventually, he got close enough to hear what was going on.
"There's a boy in the lion enclosure!"
This was not what he had been expecting at all, and he paled considerably. No, it couldn't be Scorpius - it wasn't possible! Still, he began shoving his way through the crowd, shouting his son's name every once in a while. He pushed his way to the front of the crush of people and finally looked upon the debacle that had drawn the crowd. There was his only child perched precariously on a rock in the middle of an entire pride of lions.
"SCORPIUS!" he screamed in fear.
"Hi daddy!" his son waved cheerfully at him, grinning as if it was somehow normal to be in danger of one's life.
Draco did not know what to do. There was this huge crowd of people and no zoo personnel anywhere in sight! How was he supposed to save his son when he was not only surrounded by lions, but Muggles as well??? He couldn't use his magic here! If he did, he'd break the Statute of Secrecy, and there was no way that the Aurors could Obliviate this crowd, was there? He was just beginning to feel rather panicky and helpless when the person he usually avoided appeared at his elbow and he was actually glad to see him.
"Potter!" he gasped upon seeing the familiar green eyes and messy black hair.
"What'd going on?" the man asked obliviously.
Draco pointed mutely.
"Oh," Potter scratched his head considerately. "Whose boy is that?"
"MINE!" Draco finally screeched.
"Oh," Potter repeated, proving to be quite useless so far as Draco was concerned. "That is not a good place for him to be."
"Way to state the obvious, Potter," Draco hissed. "Now, what the hell do I do about it? Those incompetent people that run this place haven't even noticed! Dammit, SCORPIUS!!!"
"Quit your wailing," Potter scowled. "I'll go get him."
"Wha- Wait, Potter, those are lions. They will eat you if you go in there!" the former Slytherin was not at all sure why he cared if Potter was eaten.
"They wouldn't eat a fellow lion," he smiled at the blonde before leaping the fence and running down into the enclosure.
"POTTER, you idiot!" Draco smacked his head with his hand in exasperation. "I am not looking while you get yourself killed!"
Fully expecting to hear screams as the stupid man was devoured, he was very surprised to instead hear cheering. Peeling one grey eye open, he saw Harry walking back across the open ground confidently and quite unmolested by lions. He nearly collapsed in relief to see that he was carrying Scorpius, who was still grinning in excitement, that brat! When the black-haired man reached the fence, he passed the blonde boy up to his father. Draco ignored the former Gryffindor as he pulled his son into a tight hug and berated him.
"You silly boy! What were you thinking, climbing into that lion pen? You could have been killed! Didn't you know that they could have eaten you whole?"
"I just wanted to see them up close," his son whined, looking up with huge eyes.
"You… Draco wasn't certain what to say to that except for one thing. "Don't do that again. Ever. Thank you Potter," he directed to the famous Wizarding icon.
"That's fine," the green eyes regarded him with a friendly look in them. "He was just curious."
"Curiosity killed the Gryffindor," he muttered as he turned to look for his wife. And as he spoke those words, he first got the foreboding feeling that Scorpius was not quite like he was.
The incident with the lions soon became forgotten, but that was not the last time that Draco wondered about his son.
"Draco," Astoria asked one evening. "Where's Scorpius? It's time for him to go to bed and the house elves don't seem to know where he is. Again."
He nearly laughed before remembering that his wife threw a mean hex. His son, it seemed, was very adept at slipping away from whoever was supposed to be watching him.
"Maybe he's hiding somewhere," he offered finally.
"It that's the case, then you are the one who's going to go find him," she replied, not even looking up from the book she was reading.
Not wanting to draw a confrontation, he left in search of the missing Scorpius, knowing that he'd find the child eventually, even if it ended up being curled up in a closet asleep. He searched everywhere that he could think of: the bedrooms and guest rooms, the sitting rooms, meeting rooms, dining halls… he even checked the kitchens and the house elf quarters to no avail. He stopped in the library to peer out the window into the darkening sky.
There was a massive thunderstorm raging outside, and the lightning was illuminating the entire landscape before it plunged into darkness again. The thunder was close enough and loud enough to rattle the paned glass and the rain was plunging down from the heavens in steady torrents. When he was a child, he recalled, he'd been terrified of thunderstorms, and his father had always had to fish him out from under his bed when one descended on the Manor. He briefly wondered if he would find Scorpius under his bed, but soon recalled that his son loved thunderstorms. In fact, he suddenly remembered that he had last seen his son by a window watching the current one approach. It had been windy out, and the way the trees moved, tossing their branches about had always seemed a bit eerie to him, but Scorpius had remarked "They look like they're dancing."
Scorpius liked dancing, he thought, before a horrifying notion occurred to him.
"No," he shook his head in denial. "Not possible."
But he resignedly got to his feet and with a anxiety driven pace strode quickly to the front doors to the Manor and threw them open. He'd no sooner stepped out when the gale outside slammed them closed again. The wind tore at his robes and buffeted him relentlessly, wailing in his ears so loudly that he could hardly hear himself breathing. He was immediately soaked to the skin, and his pale blond hair became plastered to his scalp. Outside, the storm was twice as loud and threatening, and he remembered his childhood fear with a vengeance.
"Scorpius!" he yelled into the storm, hoping his son might hear him over the claps of thunder. The air tasted a bit like it was burning.
There was no reply, but a flash of lighting lit up the night, backlighting one of the trees in front of him. In the split second of illumination, he witnessed something that sent a chill of terror down his spine.
"Scorpius!" he screamed again, so loudly it tore at his throat. "Get down from there at once! Do you hear me?! NOW!!!"
A second flash showed Scorpius happily nestled in the topmost branches waving cheerily at him. His son was sitting in a forty-foot tall tree in the middle of a thunderstorm!
"Get down!" he ordered again, waving his own arms frantically.
His son appeared to get the message, because he began his precarious descent, rapidly climbing downward. Draco nervously waited at the base of the tree, just waiting for Scorpius to slip and fall, but it never happened. Even though his son quite fearlessly hung off of branches and leaned out over empty air to gain a foothold, he never once faltered or lost his grip. In under a minute, Scorpius was standing on the ground in front of him, completely drenched, but grinning wildly, eyes blazing silver with reflected flashes from the sky.
"Did you see, father?" he asked excitedly.
"I did see, and you scared me half to death," he took a firm grip on the boy's slim hand and led him to the front doors.
"You can see everything from up there!" his son beamed up at him, oblivious to his father's anxiety over the matter.
"I'm sure you can," he shook his head despairingly as he and Scorpius came into the entrance hall, dripping water all over the carpet.
"Mother is going to be angry," his son looked mournfully at the carpet.
"How about this," Draco sighed as he lifted his son into his arms. "We don't tell your mother anything, okay? Our secret."
"Okay," his son smiled at him brightly, and Draco knew for him, he'd do anything.
The day that Draco definitely realized how different from him his son really was, he was at the Ministry filing some documents. He'd left his son in an area for children with a little red-headed girl that reminded him forcefully of Ginny Weasley at that age. He was on his way back when he ran into Potter, and had stopped, not knowing exactly what to say to the man.
"Where are you off to, Potter?" he finally asked, trying hard to keep the habitual sneer out of his voice. It would do no good to be rude to the man who'd rescued his son.
"To pick up my daughter," the raven-haired man replied.
"Red hair?" he sighed.
"Why yes!" Potter grinned at him suddenly. "How did you know?"
Suddenly, there was a loud commotion from the direction of the children's area. There was a high-pitched crying as well as several boyish shouts. Neither of the two wasted a moment as they dashed towards the children's area.
They found three children in the pen where there had only been two before. The little red-head was sitting on the ground screaming in such a high pitch that he was sure his ears would start bleeding at any moment. Potter scooped the girl up and set about trying to calm her down. The girl's cries immediately quieted to hiccupping sobs and she clutched at the shoulder of her father's robes.
But Draco's attention was all for the other to occupants of the room. His son was grappling with another, older and much larger boy, both of them hitting any inch of their opponents skin that they could reach. He swooped in, grabbing both the boys by the collars of their robes and yanked them apart. His son, never one to be deterred, resisted the pull and struggled towards the other boy, flailing fists just missing him.
"Scorpius!" he growled down at him. "Cease flopping about at once!"
His son complied grudgingly, folding his arms across his chest and pointedly ignoring the trail of blood dribbling from a cut above his eye. The other boy sneered at his son before staring insolently at him.
"What is going on here?" he demanded of them.
"He was being mean to me!" Potter's little girl pointed at the strange boy accusingly. "Scorpius saved me!"
"Well?" he directed this question to the two boys.
"He was hurting her!" his son protested, resuming the struggle against his father.
"Oh, really?" this query came from Potter, who's face darkened for a moment. "What's your name?"
"Tobias Smith," the boy replied with a glare.
"Smith?" Draco frowned. "You mean Smith as in that annoying Hufflepuff – Zacharias Smith?"
"Well, I'll be sure to have a talk with him," Potter said with a glare for the boy.
"What did I tell you about fighting, Scorpius?" he asked his own son, who hung his head in defeat.
"But he made Lily cry!" Scorpius cried in outrage. "He's not allowed to do that to one of my friends!"
Draco looked up to look at the now-sniffling girl in Potter's arms. Potter smiled down at the blonde boy and knelt with Lily so he was eye-level to him.
"Thank you for saving my daughter, Scorpius," he said seriously.
"Hey!" Scorpius' eyes went wide with surprise as he pointed at the man's forehead. "You're Harry Potter!"
Draco nearly groaned in frustration and snapped, "Manners, Scorpius!"
"What? He is!" his son glanced up at him. "I wish that I could defeat a Dark Lord one day! That would be so awesome!"
Draco looked helplessly at Potter, "I swear, he got that idea from somewhere else!"
Potter laughed and stood. "I'll be going now, Malfoy. Maybe I'll see you on September 1st."
"Scorpius will be going to Hogwarts this year," Draco confirmed.
"It will be Albus' first year as well," Harry grinned at him. "Talk to you later, Malfoy, I have a Smith to hunt down."
As Potter walked away, daughter in hand, his son piped up, "I want to be like him one day, father!"
Draco was silent, thinking that if his son wanted to be like Potter, he really needn't worry all that much.
September the 1st came, and the day dawned bright and sunny. Scorpius had been up early, grabbing last-minute items from his room and eating pieces of toast as he scrambled about. Now at least he was staying calm, even though Draco knew for a fact that he wanted to be off and running across the platform. They came upon the Hogwarts Express at last, and as they stood there, the steam shifted and a family came into view.
"It's Lily!" Scorpius looked up at his father. "I want to see her!"
"Not now, dearest," his mother stopped him with a hand to his shoulder. "The train's about to leave."
Draco looked over the other family on the platform, noting the two young boys standing there with their father as well as the red-headed girl Lily. Then, Potter caught his eye, and Draco nodded at him in recognition. It was only polite, after all.
"Father," Scorpius tugged on his sleeve. "What if I'm not in Slytherin?"
He looked down at the wide grey eyes filled with childish worry and smiled, "If you're not in Slytherin, then you're not in Slytherin, and that's that. I'll be proud of you either way."
"Really!" his son beamed up at him. "That's great!"
He waved to his son as Scorpius boarded the train, and the boy hung out the window of his carriage carelessly and recklessly to wave back. Draco smiled to himself as they left the platform, waiting for the letter home that would confirm what he already knew.
It arrived later that night, and he was happy to read that his son had already made friends with Albus Potter and a few other children whose names he recognized vaguely. But he was most proud by the very first line of the letter.
I'm in Gryffindor.
How was that? *anxious* I haven't ever written a family fic before. Although I must say it was a lot of fun scaring Draco so much!