Two updates in one day, how surprising.
Warnings. Death. Angst.
I used to think life was a thing of beauty, like a butterfly flitting from one flower to the next. The first cries of new born or the whispered promises of a first love.
I had been in Slytherin. I graduated Hogwarts with enough Exceeds Expectations on my N.E.W.T.s to have become a healer if I had wanted to. My family had made it through the war unscathed. I had an arranged marriage to a perfectly respectable pure blood male. We had more money than we could spend in several lifetimes. We had a healthy son. Everything seemed perfect.
Two years after Scorpius was born, I found myself pregnant again. Draco was thrilled. Four months into the pregnancy, I fell ill. I can not rightly recall what malady I had, only that after several potions, I seemed to be in perfect health. The same could not be said for the child.
After that, Draco refused to look at me. If he had to speak to me, he said my name like it tasted bitter on his tongue. "Astoria." He moved my rooms to a separate wing of the house and could often be found sequestered in his office. It was as if the lost of the pregnancy had shattered his frail peace after the war. He refused to see anyone. Even his mother was turned away.
If I had known just how bad things were, I might have forced my way into his office or maybe called St Mungo's. I thought after he had time to grieve, things would return to some semblance of normalcy.
On the day the child was to be born, a house elf came to me, frantically wailing about Master Malfoy. I couldn't make out most of what it said, but I heard enough. Draco was dead. I called St. Mungo's and the Aurors. They took his body away and declared it a suicide. Poison.
At the funeral, his mother was inconsolable. I, on the other hand, had not shed a single tear. My sister Daphne said it must be shock. After everything was over and his body had been entombed in the family mausoleum, Scorpius went to stay with his paternal grandparents in France and I went to stay with my parents.
I couldn't bare the thought of seeing my own child, a perfect copy of his father. He stayed with his grandparents until he was old enough for school, and then, over the summer. I stayed with my parents and after their deaths, my sister and her husband. I mostly stay in my rooms, sometimes straying out onto the balcony to watch the birds.
The only things I knew of the outside world were whispers I heard from guests, whose voices carried to my perch on the balcony. Scorpius had gone on to marry the youngest Potter. Longbottom had become headmaster of Hogwarts. Narcissa and Lucius had died the year after Scorpius had finished school.
Scorpius never tried to see me. I never reached out to him. I was content to spend my days alone. The healers said the trauma of both losses had broken something in my mind. I insisted I was fine. After all, I had the butterflies and birds.
I hope you enjoyed it.
-Misery
