yayyyyyy thank you everyone who revieweddddd
also, i will be honest...thanks to anyone who read my story!
jk rowling owns harry potter blah blah blah
Draco was still in the same position he had been in the whole day; sprawled out on his bed, half under the covers, legs and arms thrown at random with sheets twisted around his limbs as a result of his efforts in trying to get comfortable. He had managed to doze around one o'clock and but had woken up at four, the worst part of every one of his days, and had stayed awake since.
He was irritable and frustrated with his lack of sleep, but his mind was too depressed to even worry about those feelings. Irritability and frustration were emotions that Draco had not felt in a long time, so long in fact, that it was hard for him now to recognize what they were, let alone deal with those feelings.
He just lay there, trying to see if he could slip back into sleep, but he just felt like crying.
In fact, what Draco didn't know was that crying would probably make him feel better, but recently he could hardly even make his eyes water even if he prodded at the corneas. Draco had given up crying six months ago when he had decided it just took too much energy.
The blonde man's reasoning was that he knew everyone else in his apartment building was prone to crying at any given moment, so they were doing the crying for him. But it was more than that. His deep melancholia was exhausting. As it coursed through his body and mind, it physically rode him hard, and he could feel it, at the end of each day, a pressing weight becoming heavier on his chest by the hour, squeezing him, compressing him, and holding him down.
Holding him together as well. Like a pressurized container holding water, Draco was a prisoner of his sadness but it held him in one spot, it stopped him from leaking out. But as Draco held in his tears and his past, as he rolled them all into a tight ball that he tucked in firmly behind his heart, he filled his container to the brim, and beyond, which tested how well the walls were made.
Draco didn't know how close he was to breaking.
As the man stared off into space for another good three hours, his thoughts didn't wander far from the ceiling he was looking at. The weight Draco felt on his heart was everywhere, even on his eyes and it took a lot of effort to move them around to look at things. He much preferred gazing at one spot for a long time. Like the ceiling.
Or the television, Draco thought as he rolled his eyes laboriously down so he could see the black box. He could feel the cold hardware of the remote near his left hand but as he gripped it with his hand, he found it to be too heavy to lift. And even before that, he had lost interest in even watching the telly halfway through picking up the remote.
Fuck it, Draco told himself, rationalizing the fact that he couldn't pick up the remote with the fact that he hadn't really wanted to in the first place. He changed his mind a lot lately, especially when it gave him the excuse not to do something hard.
He had never been a lazy boy, his mother and father both taught him the value of a hard day's work, but it was work of a different sort. Striving ahead in school was taught to Draco consciously by both his parents who excelled in the Ministry and in social circles with little trouble and who both pushed him to achieve his fullest potential when it came to his classes and Quidditch. But unconsciously, his parents had taught him something else entirely: manipulation and lying.
Draco was a clever wizard, more so than his outward appearance showed while he was at school, especially when his insecurities took over as a young adolescent at the head of a group of rowdy Slytherin boys and especially when Harry Potter was around.
The Boy Who Lived represented a threat to Draco; a threat against his parents and against what had been taught to his housemates by their parents. To deal with this added pressure, Draco again turned to what his parents had shown him at home. Whether they had wanted their only child to emulate their manipulative ways against his peers at school was unknown to Draco. But with the absence of approval from his parents while he was at Hogwarts, the vigorous approval of his friends worked just as well to solidify the behavior.
Draco had only learned what he had been taught. It was a result of the environment in which he grew up that came from the environment in which his parents had grown up. The young Malfoy heir was nothing more than a product of nurture. That is, he was, until his sixth year.
Draco had been forced to do something no one should have to do unwillingly at the threat of pain to his beloved mother and the disgrace of his father. Draco was helpless. But with his failure to kill Dumbledore in his sixth year combined with the eye-opening year of loneliness and peer ostracism in his final year at school, Draco grew up.
With no one to rely on Draco found himself drawn to a world of self-evaluation and reflection upon his years at Hogwarts and he found himself riddled with regret and self-pity. And with no one to turn to for affirmation and comfort of his feelings, he hoped to get any sort of confirmation from Harry Potter in the Great Hall those many years ago.
But the black haired boy wonder had shut him and his family down and turned them away from reassurance. Draco felt for sure he would have started to permanently harden if he hadn't met Astoria.
Astoria. Draco felt his throat clench and rubbed it, slowly and arduously. It too, like his son's, had been a while since he thought her name.
His beautiful wife that had come into his life like a light he needed to revolve around. She smiled at him whenever he needed and she filled in certain holes in his life that he missed. She helped him clean out the Manor, she helped him take care of his father, and then his mother before they each passed away of old age that had come upon them both too soon.
Astoria Greengrass was a beautiful witch. Coming from a respectable family, Narcissa had instantly approved of her son's choice not only for that reason but because she believe that Astoria would be good for him.
She was right. Draco's wife kept him balanced. For all that Draco was and appeared to be, he was very much a child at heart. While Draco's actual childhood was not cut short in any way, his innocence was. So he made up for it everyday in little ways. He was impulsive and charming in the way a little boy is, all the while maintaining the appropriate Malfoy manners around company and the public eye.
But when he was with Astoria, Draco never held anything back. And they enjoyed each other's presence for their two years of dating and then two years of marriage. It was a perfect life, Draco remembered thinking.
She had never made him laugh, though. Nor did he feel as if she would hold him as he cried, or plan exciting trips that would never happen late into the night with just the light of a wand and an out of date map. Astoria wasn't one for dreaming or dallying near flowers or thinking about silly adventures just for them.
But she had given him a son.
Draco felt his throat clench tighter.
Those early days had been bliss, pure paradise.
Draco was working for the Ministry then, a lowly position but respectable all the same. At least they had let him work there. They even gave him health insurance and the weekends and holidays off just like any other employee. The paycheck had been nice, too.
Ever since the final decent of his family's position happened when he was seventeen, Draco had noticed a slight dwindling of funds, but nothing drastic. Astoria and Draco found that they still could easily afford the Manor as well as pay off the hospital and in-home care bills for his parents in a timely fashion.
Draco knew then that he was no longer as rich as he once was. With his father wasting much of their money on bribes and various errands for the Dark Lord, their money was substantial enough for their lifestyle but Draco was used to more, and was pleased in a satisfied sort of way whenever a payment was deposited into their vault at Gringotts.
He was also satisfied coming home to a family. He never thought he would be the one to enjoy that type of life but every time his son came running to him on his stubby baby legs at the end of a long workday and he carried him into the kitchen to help Astoria finish making the dinner, Draco felt an odd sort of pleasure.
The new Malfoy family's golden age ended in a swift and abrupt halt when Scorpious fell sick.
For all the magic that Draco had learned and read about in school, he could never and would never understand how there could be such an illness that could claim his son. And for all the trials Draco had been through and maturing he had done, Draco was not at all prepared for this loss, which followed closely on the heels of his mother's death and ended in Astoria leaving him.
For nothing can damage a marriage worse than losing a child. Astoria's personality wasn't one of sticking around to figure it out either. She had been raised by her family to be a doting wife, one a pure-blood wizarding family would be proud of, as so she was taught the ways of a dutiful wife as a proper witch.
She could take care of anyone that had to possibility of an end point, either in getting better or finally being laid to rest as a result of a long full life, as in that of Draco's parents. But when her son fell sick and she knew no hope at all, she began to unravel. And without the promise of her husband recovering from his depression, Astoria dissapperated to find solace and answers elsewhere.
Draco tried not to think back to the hospital almost three years ago, but he couldn't help it.
There had been a witch sitting next to him in the waiting room of the corporate offices of head of hospital policies who couldn't stop rocking back and forth in what appeared to be extreme sorrow. Draco's stomach was already in knots for fear of his son's life and the witch's movements next to him weren't helping at all.
He finally was called and ushered into the office of an unusually small wizard whom Draco originally thought to be a dwarf of some sort but realized eventually that he was just a very slender man.
"Please sit, Mr. Malfoy," the wizard said, all manners, but the pleasantries were lost on Draco who got straight to the point.
"Tell me once and for all, plainly too, why you are choosing to refuse my claim?" Draco had taken out his wand and was wringing it nervously, causing it to glow slightly.
The man behind the desk sat down and sighed, as if his decision weight mightily upon his conscious. "I'm sorry Mr. Malfoy," he began. "But your policy that you signed with the Ministry does not cover experimental treatments at all. You would have to pay out of pocket I'm afraid."
Draco had been stunned. "Out of pocket?" He had been trying to keep his voice below a yell and as a result, his voice cracked under the strain. "And how much would that be?"
"10,000,000 galleons, Mr. Malfoy. But you have to be pre-approved to commit to that payment and I took the liberty of checking your bank vault at Gringotts and I am sorry but the funds just aren't there. You will not be approved for even getting on a loan list at this point."
His ears were ringing at this point.
"There is just nothing we can do," the man continued to say.
Draco looked up and met the eyes of this bureaucrat. "Nothing you can do?" He asked, voice raspy. "My child is downstairs, dying and he could be saved with this treatment and you won't give it to me. I have a house, I could sell my house…" Draco had trailed off when he saw the man shaking his head.
"Like I said before, Mr. Malfoy, the treatment is experimental so we don't even know if it will work. There is not a 100 percent guarantee that your son will recover so the Ministry's policy is clear. Without proof that this cause is worthwhile, they will not give you approval for payment."
"NOT WORTHWHILE!" Draco had roared, startling the thing man. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean!"
The slender wizard looked alarmed. "Please, Mr. Malfoy, control yourself."
Draco stood up, his tall and powerful frame towering over the seated imbicille in front of him. "You tell the Ministry that 100 percent chance is shit." He spat the words. "Even a one percent chance should be enough for them to save the life of a little boy. So who the fuck do I have to talk to around here to get some answers?"
Draco had been escorted out of the office shortly thereafter by security and had not been allowed back in for any more meetings. Astoria was devastated. She had always believed Draco's influence would work and she had clung to it with a lasting hope that was ferocious. Now that it was gone, she was lost.
Draco had tried to gain a meeting with the head hospital administrator for St. Mungo's and then the minister himself, but he was barred at every turn because he was a Malfoy and a poor Malfoy at that. Furthermore, Draco had convinced himself it was also the result of his outburst and was deeply ashamed and disappointed in himself for not maintaining a better decorum, one that had been taught to him from childhood.
But there was nothing they could do. No one would give them a loan because they were Malfoys and they didn't have good enough credit, they had no friends that were able to front the money and with the Ministry's red tape blocking them at every chance, Draco and Astoria floundered in their distress.
Finally they turned back to their son in a quiet resolve of wanting to spend the last few days they had together with him. They traveled with him as far as his health would allow which consisted of the seashore and the last trek up to see the sunset. Draco would always regret not having more time with him.
The end of Scorpious' life rushed up to greet the two parents with the last morning of their son being in agonizing pain and no one doing a thing about it. When Draco could ignore the screams no longer, he finally ripped off the sheets and scooped the child up in his arms and held him there for fourteen hours as he died.
Astoria was huddled in the corner with her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth in extreme sorrow that Draco turned from. It reminded him too much of the witch he had seen in the policy office and it almost felt like that stranger had been a kind of foreshadowing that Draco had missed.
The last few hours were the worst. As his son's body began its final shut down, the boy stopped screaming but he looked up at his father with eyes that were a vibrant blue that Draco had hoped for but filled with an immense pain that Draco had never hoped to see.
They were almost pleading with him and he announced the fact to his useless wife.
"Astoria, I swear, he needs it. It's almost like he's asking me to do it." Draco had whispered.
The woman had moaned. "No, no, Draco don't," her voice turned into a desperate whine at the end. "Don't do it."
Draco hadn't realized that he had begun to cry until a tear splashed upon his son's forehead. Hastily wiping it off, Draco found himself determined. "I have to, for his sake." He reached for his wand.
Astoria stood up at that moment. "For his sake, or yours, Draco. He's in pain but he doesn't understand it, much less how to silently ask for release."
"He's my son!" Draco roared. "I know what he wants."
His wife was tugging on his arm, hanging on him. "He wants you to stay strong, he wants you to be a father and hold him."
Draco jerked away. "No, he doesn't. I can't bear to see him in any more pain."
"Exactly!" Astoria yelled desperately. "You can't. Not him, it's you, these are your feelings, you're projecting them onto our son. You're doing this to yourself. I know you Draco, if you do this, you'll never forgive yourself!"
Draco ignored his wife and raised his wand higher. "Yes I will," he whispered crazily. "I will forgive myself because this is the right thing to do."
"NO!" Astoria shrieked. "Please! Draco, don't, that's our son, that's your son! Draco, DON'T!" Her cries became wordless screams as Draco brought his wand down.
"Avada Kedavra," Draco said simply.
He didn't bother closing his eyes against the flash of green light, but he continued to stare into the eyes of his son that immediately went dark with lack of life.
All he could hear then were the screams of Astoria calling him a murder and a coward.
Present-day Draco turned over on his side and vomited over his mattress and onto the floor.
His stomach still heaving, he heard a clinking noise that wasn't familiar to the blonde man at all. Draco wanted to get up immediately and see who was on the other side of his door, but it took even more of his energy just to lie there, heaving and trying to catch his breath from his violent memories.
wow, so that was long!
s'more please? and i mean reviews not porridge or girl scout cookies