(A/N So I finally finished one of my summer-reading books, and decided to reward myself with some fan fiction, so I sat down with a pen, and this is what came out. I think it'll turn into a fairly decent sized chapter-fic, and yes, it will end up being slash, so if you don't like that and read this anyway, you're pretty dumb.
Also, just as a warning, I wrote this under the influence of too much Jane Austen, and I think it shows. It won't all be this flowery, but I think it works for this kind of prologue.)
There's a child who scuttles through the attics like a rat. He knows the house like the back of his hand, but when his mother occasionally prevails on him to clean up is appearance and join his parents for dinner, the pale, scrawny boy they are presented with blinks in the unaccustomed brightness of the dining room.
Though an unquestionably clever child, he does not learn to speak properly until he begins to spend regular periods of time in the company of other human beings when his education starts at the age of five, for around the age he'd begun to toddle around the floor on his own, his parents' already tenuous relationship began to dissolve in earnest, and in their unhappiness the boy was often neglected.
In finding himself largely unsupervised he explored every nook and cranny of the house which had lost the bulk of its luster long ago. He almost never missed more than a meal or two before one or both of his parents recalled his existence, but before long even that care became unnecessary, as the child learned to find his way to the kitchen and feed himself, in a piecemeal way.
He also took to sleeping in an abandoned turret of the house, Malfoy Manor, spurning the room which had been his as a very small child, which his parents had prepared at is birth, and which was never redecorated.
And so he grew into an odd youth, bookish but not particularly studious, a nocturnal prowler of the old house in all its crumbling grandeur. He filled his scantily furnished tower room (which neither of his parents could locate or had laid eyes on) with trinkets, moldering texts and antique novels, and long-forgotten treasures and heirlooms, which he collected with a magpie-like fervor.
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The boy was sent off to school in an unexceptionable manner, where he was sorted with little ceremony and less deliberation into Ravenclaw. He was considered by nearly everyone he came across to be unusually grave and silent for an eleven-year-old, and many would have been content to assume him simple, were it not for the house into which he'd been sorted.
He began a few friendly acquaintances, but made no real friend. Perhaps it was only that he was so quiet, but perhaps the lack of intimacy could be explained by the slightly feral air which clung to him still.
His years at school proceeded fairly quietly for some time, and after a while he came to form one close friendship, with the elderly Madam Pince, who retained the post of Librarian. On Sundays, when the Library was closed, she would invite the boy to tea in her rooms, to discuss any of the multitude of books he devoured week after week.
His mother abandoned husband and child to elope abroad when the boy was thirteen, but his life was not greatly effected, despite the fact that he rarely heard from her thereafter. Shortly after Mrs. Malfoy's defection, however, the boy's father, Draco, began renewing a few friendships of his youth, particularly with former Death Eaters, their families, or those who had been known to support the cause of that extinct group.
In renewing the aforementioned acquaintances, and in his rejection by his wife and subsequent divorce, Draco had begun to acquire a certain violence of character which had been missing even in the most damnable episodes of his youth. The new-found violence was given an outlet when his son came home for the Easter holidays at the age of fourteen holding an envelope from the headmaster, the contents of which detailed the unacceptable number of absences from class Scorpius had accumulated over the previous term (for while the boy had neither the inclination nor opportunity to get into much mischief , he was very apt to miss a class for no better reason than losing track of the time while engrossed in an advanced book on the very subject of the class he was missing).
The very existence of his father's unprecedented rage and violence shocked Scorpius almost as much as the shouts and blows which were the result, and when Draco roused himself, in a fit of remorse, to apologize and see how his son fared, Scorpius had already disappeared into the dark, twisting upper-reaches of the house which none could fathom but him.
The incident caused a marked difference on the attitude of the house, and also signified a clear division of territory when Scorpius was home. The kitchen was neutral, and none entered the dining room, site of those few and far between family dinners, and the boy inhabited the third floor and attics for his nocturnal rambling and diurnal rest, while Draco inhabited the first and second floors, but mostly the basement, as he plotted and schemed and stewed in a feeling of ill-use and an instability bordering on madness which ran in his mother's line.
The house, in all its dust and decay, radiated malevolence and division. Anyone should have been able to see that it was only a matter of time….
TO BE CONTINUED….
PLEASE, just review. It will make me so happy….