It seemed like just yesterday Emerald was running out to greet me as I walked up the stoneway to our manor. She looked so beautiful with her long dark red hair flowing behind her and her yellow sundress against her body with the wind. Her small form jumped into my open arms and I held her there, kissing her sweet lips, a smile on my face. Then my smile turning to disbelief when her melodious voice laughed out that they were pregnant. I was going to be a father to a child.
Months later, we found that the child would be a tiny girl. A tiny, bouncing baby girl. While we decorating one of the guest rooms light pink, transforming it into the nursery, I was terrified about caring for a tiny being smaller than the size of my forearm. What if she slipped out of my grasp? What if she grew up hating me as I hated my own father? What if she grew up just to be just like me?
My wife would just smile each time I fretted over those thoughts and brought them to her attention. I noticed she would never worry about our soon to be born girl. All she would say when I asked her if she was terrified as I was, was that I would be a wonderful father. It was just a few weeks later, a mere week before our daughter would be born, that I found out why she never was worried. The first thing I learned about Emerald when I first met her was that she was a promising Seer, even at the young age of eleven. Her visions had never once failed her all her life.
But just this once, I had wished with all my might that she would be wrong about this.
Emerald didn't even fret over that she was not going to be able to help raise our baby. She had foreseen her own death during childbirth and had come to accept it. I would have to bring up a tiny human all by myself. A tiny human girl that I helped create, when the woman who would give birth to her would die and leave me alone. For days, I was blaming myself for this. If I hadn't have impregnated her, she would still be here. Not even a year ago had I lost my best friend who I had been in love with since childhood, and Merlin was taking away my wife as soon as we were to be parents.
It pained me to hold our baby girl as Emerald lied there on the bed, the ghost of a smile still gracing her beautiful, paling face. The girl had been born looking just like me, with the exception of her bright blue eyes and soft nose...and the few red strands of hair mixed in with her night sky hair. I named her after her mother. Thus Maeve Emerald was my daughter's name.
But once more, Merlin took my only love left away from me in a form of Voldemort on her third birthday. At the thought of losing my daughter just three years after losing her mother and four years after losing my best friend, I lost all my thoughts and banished the disgusting form from my manor. Dumbledore had pronounced that my little Maeve was still alive, just poisoned and had what little memories she had possessed over her short time alive erased. He had thought that to keep her safe was to take her away from me and the magical world until he deemed his only grandchild able to attend Hogwarts.
Fate had not been kind to me.
All those years of not being able to see my baby girl had turned me into a cruel and heartless man. Seven years I had to go without raising the only thing I had left of my wife, yet even after, I could not bring myself to introduce myself as her father. When I first saw her enter the Great Hall when she was just ten years old, I was shocked. She was such a happy girl. A bouncy girl with an amazing personality and I couldn't believe that this child was my own daughter. Later that night, Dumbledore pulled me into his office to remind me about the poison that was flowing through her system as we spoke. It was the only thing that made Dumbledore bring her in a year earlier than the others. She would barely make it past her seventh year before the poison would take her life.
I didn't want to lose her after only just getting her back. My thoughts raced before coming to my conclusion. I couldn't bring myself to tell her I was her father. I didn't want to go through all the pain of losing a third woman who meant the world to me. I would act as if she was just any other student, not my own daughter, and distance myself from her. That way when the time came for her death, I wouldn't be affected by it any more than any other staff member.
But then I saw her in my class in her Slytherin uniform. I heard her answer my questions that Potter could not answer himself. There was no way I could avoid her. Her brilliant blue eyes would always be intently focused on her potions or essay that I would assign, and she would be the first one completed every time. It was as if she had been screaming for attention and approval from me without knowing it. Maeve didn't know who her father was, but she had been getting help from Dumbledore and had quickly realized it was a staff member.
When her name came out of the goblet with Potter's name in her fourth year, I was terrified. The poison in her body had quickly sped up with her active in Quidditch and breaking a bone each year. She would have been luck to make it out of her fourth year alive, and Dumbledore had told her she would not be back for her fifth. I had still not revealed myself, but when he spoke to me of that, I could not help but want to cry. I was trying to distance myself from the small girl, yet I was not ready to watch her die. I knew then that I would never be ready to see that happen. She was my daughter no matter what I did.
Within days of her arrival during fourth year and the goblet incident, Maeve figured out that I was her father. I denied it up front, still trying to distance myself from the inevitable, but Dumbledore kept pushing her at me until I finally cracked and gave in. I had never held nor watched a girl sleep as long as I held my daughter that night. My daughter was back where she belonged, but within months she would be taken away from me and would sleep in the ground.
The time came, of course, at the end of the year. During the Diggory boy's memorial, Draco Malfoy had started yelling for help. My daughter had passed out in his arms and would not wake up. Pomfrey attempted to be the first one over to her, but I would not allow that. I quickly scooped my daughter's seemingly lifeless body out of Malfoy's crying form and ran to the Hospital Wing, Pomfrey, Dumbledore, Potter, the Weasley boys, Granger, and Malfoy quick behind me. Dumbledore had forced the other students to say their goodbyes and leave Hogwarts grounds as their friend and girlfriend was dying in the Wing. When I saw their tears, I couldn't bring myself to just sit by my daughter's side and watch her die. Each night there was a gut-wrenching scream that would have made even Voldemort cry. So each night and every day, I was in my classroom, creating an antidote I could only hope would work.
Months later, my beautiful daughter had walked down the stairs of our manor on the arms of Goyle and Crabbe down into a shocked Malfoy's arms and an even more surprised group of friends and people. I was proud of her. She had fought her battle brilliantly and with the help of my antidote, she had came back at a full recovery. Which was amazing and very much needed to win the war.
If only I could have been there at the end to watch the seventeen year old Malfoy scoop my sixteen year old baby girl into his arms and propose. But I hadn't been.