Chapter 56: Sometimes Accidents are on Purpose.
Draco Malfoy glances up as we enter his study. The room is lit by the fire in the hearth and by several torches lining the side walls. His desk is neat.
"Scorpius?" Draco asks "I thought you were staying with the Potter's this week? What are you doing here?"
He looks concerned as his blue gaze leaps between me and Malfoy.
"Dad, something's happened, we need to talk to you and Mum, without the girls."
Scorpius says seriously. I glance at him. I know he's happy at the fact that this bond has formed between us but I can feel his nervousness at explaining to his parents that at seventeen, their oldest son is tied to another person with longer reaching consequences and more complications than a marriage. Gently I take his hand in mine and squeeze it reassuringly. Malfoy doesn't take his eyes off his father, but through our bond I can feel his love at my actions.
Draco Malfoy frowns deeply. "Is everything alright?" he asks his, his eyes are serious and by his tone I realise that he is expecting life altering, awful news. I raise my eyebrows slightly. He must suspect that we're about to tell them I'm pregnant. For a moment the idea plays in my mind, baiting the Malfoy's as I did Scorpius earlier, but given the seriousness of our current situation they might think we are just joking if we play a trick on them now.
"Erm… It will be best if we explain to you and Mum at the same time." Scorpius hedges.
Draco Malfoy's frown deepens at his son's words and he gets to his feet without another word, striding quickly around his desk and out the door. Scorpius and I trail along behind him as he locates his wife in their monster of a house.
"Astoria, the boy has something important he needs to discuss with us." Draco Malfoy informs Astoria as he strides into the library where she sits in an armchair reading by the fire.
Astoria looks up in alarm and when she sees me and Scorpius standing behind Mr. Malfoy her eyes go wide with worry.
"Dad, you should sit." Scorpius tells him softly.
Slowly Mr Malfoy lowers himself into a vacant arm chair next to his wife's chair, while Scorpius leads me over to sit on a two-seater couch opposite Mr and Mrs Malfoy. They both watch us warily and I notice their eyes searching for evidence that Scorpius is fussing over me as though I actually were pregnant. I take a deep steadying breath and gently squeeze Malfoy's hand.
"Something's happened." Scorpius repeats himself.
I scan his parent's faces and notice that Astoria's bottom lip has begun to tremble.
"I'm not pregnant or anything." I jump to reassure them.
Both of them deflate before my eyes, their baited breaths whooshing out in heavy, relieved sighs. Draco presses a hand to his chest and glares at his son.
"Don't scare me like that. I nearly had a bloody heart attack when you walked into my study wearing that terrified expression." He admonishes us.
"Sorry Dad." Scorpius murmurs.
"Well, if you haven't gotten Rose pregnant before either of you have finished school then what's happened that has you looking so terrified and being so serious?" Astoria asks worriedly.
"How do we explain this?" Scorpius asks, turning towards me and searching my face as though my eyebrows might be hiding the answers of how to broach the subject with his parents. Making a mental note to do some eyebrow maintenance I turn back to the Malfoy's
"Do either of you know what this is?" I ask, taking off my locket and holding it out to them, knowing that Draco at least has some vague knowledge about my locket.
"The old Malfoy family Heirloom?" He asks bewildered "What does this have to do with anything?"
"As you say it is a Malfoy heirloom. According to you it was a necklace given to the women that were betrothed to Malfoy sons' generations ago. You told Scorpius it went missing during his great-great grandfather's time. Well, I found it in the room of hidden things in the room of requirement at Hogwarts in my second year when I got curious and went poking around in there, finding several items that had survived the ravages of Fiende Fire, this locket among them." I begin to explain.
"Since second year I've been wearing it, having no idea of what it meant or that it even belonged to you guys. Scorpius relayed to me what you told him about it representing that I was intending to be a Malfoy bride, but that the tradition had died out when the necklace was lost and that since I liked it I might as well keep it." I explain "I tried opening the locket a whole bunch of times when I found it and I was never successful. But it turns out that this locket had a whole lot more tradition behind it than just being a gift the Malfoy men passed down and gave to their wives."
"What do you mean?" Astoria asks me curiously.
"Well, yesterday Scorpius and I…" I blushed when I realised I had been about to casually say to his parents that we had had sex "Erm…. Well we were intimate…. And anyway, yesterday was the first time I told him that I love him."
Astoria beams at my words and Draco's eyes twinkle with mirth at my lame way of avoiding using the word sex. Scorpius takes over the explaining as I blush crimson, the bond telling me that he is also amused at hearing me tell his parents I told him I love him while having sex with him.
"We were having sex" he says bluntly, and Astoria blushes at her own gasp of shock "When she told me she loves me, we were having sex. We didn't know it at the time, but Rose wearing the locket, while telling me she loves me for the first time, during sex, unlocked the old magic in the locket."
Draco and Astoria watch us with mixed expressions of worry and shock and curiosity.
"It turns out that the combination of those things met the stipulations of the magical process the tradition of giving this locket was based on." I say "Everything went crazy around us and our whole bodies burned like we were hit with a hundred stinging jinxes at once, but then it sort of plateaued and we both realised something was different."
"We've been magically bonded." Scorpius says.
"What does that mean?" Draco asks.
"Well, we are now able to get impressions of each other's emotions." I say "Basically, it's like having a part of Scorpius's soul inside my body, replacing the piece of mine that is now in his. It means that we can feel what the other person is feeling, for example right now Scorpius is nervous, but happy and a little hungry."
Astoria chuckles.
"Anyway, since neither of us had ever really heard of anything like this happening, we tested it a little, we can feel each other's emotions, but aren't telepathic. And as of yet it seems we can feel that even if we're away from each other. But I was curious about it, so I asked my Mum if she knew anything about bonds like this. She sort of flipped when she found out what I meant, because she had heard of them in some old book she read in the restricted section at Hogwarts. It seems a lot of the Pure-blood families used to imbue objects with magic that allowed for the formations of such bonds, but everyone except the Malfoy's dropped the tradition hundreds of years ago."
Draco raises his eyebrows in shock that his family had done something so rebellious.
"She knew how they work, and what triggered them." I say "As you can imagine she was less than pleased about it, especially because of what we had to be doing for the bond to form in the first place. Until last night we hadn't actually gotten around to telling anyone outside of you guys and Albus that we're dating. But anyway, when she calmed down a little she explained what she knew about them. It seems this type of bond allows our mind to connect like they have, because our souls have pretty much fused together."
I wait for the Malfoy's to understand what I'm saying.
"Our life forces are linked." Scorpius tells them softly when they don't seem to grasp the seriousness of what I said.
"Oh Merlin." Draco sighs, scrubbing his hand over his face as the weight of the situation drops on him.
"Meaning that if either of you was to die; you would both die at the same time?" Astoria qualifies. When I nod she bursts into tears.
"Something happened alright." Draco Malfoy grumbles worriedly.
"When the bond kicked in, the locket unlocked too. This was inside it." I say, handing him the piece of parchment his ancestor left for us. He scans it quickly.
"Is there anything else?" he asks finally, suddenly looking much older than he did half an hour ago.
"Not really, as you read, apparently our life forces have fused together, so if either of us dies its lights out for both of us. And the type of magic imbued in the locket to form the bond makes it so that we're bound more closely than a married couple. But other than that, we haven't heard of anything dangerous or life threatening about the situation." Scorpius says.
"And how are the two of you dealing with this? Rose isn't even of age. Yet as you've just said, you might as well have come to us and announced that Rose was pregnant and you two were intending to get married before going back to school in September." Draco says, shaking his head, worried and irritable.
"We were hoping that somewhere in the Manor we could find a portrait of Viviana Malfoy, hoping she'd be able to tell us anything else we would need to know about the whole thing." I say, trying to present useful ideas to the conversation while Astoria sniffled softly.
"But you haven't told us how the two of you feel about this. Your whole lives have been uprooted, and transplanted into the same pot. Do either of you have any feelings or thoughts to share on the matter, beyond the facts?"
I glance at Scorpius. He shrugs at me.
"Truthfully, I'm in love with Rose and as you know, I have been for a while." Scorpius says, I can feel his embarrassment though the bond as he glances at me sideways and I wonder just how long he's know he was in love with me.
"I pretty much hoped that we'd stay together this year at school, and then when we'd graduated and both had jobs, I intended to ask her to marry me anyway." Scorpius shrugs "This bond just takes out the guesswork."
Draco watches his eldest son with an odd expression on his face. As though he can't believe the words coming out of Scorpius's mouth.
"How is it" he begins wonderingly "That at seventeen you have that sort of plan in place for your life? When I was seventeen the only plan I had was to try and stay alive."
"You know how long I've had a thing for Rose." Scorpius says very softly to his father, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as the bond presents me with a type of mental squirm. Draco nods and chuckles, shaking his head "And what about you Rose Weasley, any feelings on the topic?"
I gulp. "Erm…. At this stage I didn't exactly have that sort of plan, I mean, when I agreed to be Scorp's girlfriend I suppose I sort of assumed we'd fall in love and eventually work our way around to marriage and maybe a family, but the bond doesn't really bother me. It's dangerous in that we'll both die if something happens to either of us, but other than that I think we'll live through it."
I give a mental squirm of my own as I force the images of my dream about the future from my mind before I can feel hopeful for them and tip Scorpius off. I think it might just overwhelm him to learn that not only is he linked to me for the rest of our lives, but I've also been secretly hoping for a future with him that will result in us having at least four children, whilst living here at Malfoy Manor and being so incredibly in love that every time I look at Scorpius Malfoy my heart feels like it wants to leap out of my chest so it can just keep expanding with all my love for him.
"You both seem to be taking this incredibly well considering that this time last year you were both at each other's throats with hatred." Astoria says.
Scorpius and I glance at each other. It is true that not so long ago we completely detested each other, or at least I detested him. I'm beginning to wonder after his comments today, just how long it has been that he's had a crush on me. After all, he was thrilled when he found out about the bond we had formed while I was slightly worried and confused by the whole thing.
I raise my eyebrows at him as something awful occurs to me. What if Scorpius knew all along about the magic of the locket? What if he knew that having me fall in love with him and tell him so, while wearing the locket during sex would trigger the old magic it contained?
After all, he commented months and months ago when we got drunk and still hated each other that the locket marked me as his. I assumed at the time that it was just symbolic. But what if he knew all along that this might happen if everything turned out just right? Every time I wasn't wearing it I subconsciously noticed that he frowned at whatever necklace I wore instead, and whenever he saw me wearing the locket again he would beam happily. And he seemed to love that I was wearing every time we had sex.
Scorpius's curiosity at the sudden suspicion rolling through the bond between us has me staring at him worriedly. Can I really just come out and accuse him of knowing all along that this could happen.
"Erm…. Scorpius…. Can I speak with you for a moment?"
Malfoy tilts his head sideways at me but smiles just the same.
"Do you guys know anything else about this bond?" he appeals to his parents.
"Sorry Scorp, but until you told me about it and showed me that letter I'd never even heard about that sort of ritual or tradition." Draco Malfoy says bluntly. "But since it seems irreversible, I would suggest that you two try your hardest to continue to get along. After all, it would be terribly difficult to break up and fall for other people when you both are aware of the emotions each other is experiencing. However, that does not mean I want you to running out and doing something irrational like eloping or no longer taking precautions as far as sex and unwanted pregnancy goes. Understand? Just because the two of you are now bonded together, does not mean you can just do irrational things, especially since Rose isn't even of age just yet. And Scorpius while you are of age and seem to have your head screwed on far better than I did at seventeen, I absolutely forbid you to get married until you have completed your schooling and have a job of some kind."
"We understand Mr Malfoy. There won't be any sort of irrational action going on. I promise." I say sternly, narrowing my eyes sideways at Scorpius, my suspicions multiplying by the second.
"Well then my only other concern is that you two are now tied together. I expect that you will keep this bond between you a secret; after all it is rather complicated. However, I would also prefer it if the both of you manage to live long and happy lives and since that now relies on both of you for either one of you to achieve that, then you really ought to do your damndest to see to it that you both live long and happy lives. And I expect Weasel King will have a fit when he learns the two of you are dating and have bonded yourselves together with more strength than a marriage bond, so Rose, do try to ease him into the information and make sure that he understand that murdering my son will also cost him your life as well."
"I'm not so certain he should know that killing either of us kills both" I say "Knowing him he'll flip out and think that this bond will just make murdering us both a whole lot easier, because I'm almost certain that he'll want us both dead when he finds out I went and fell in love with then proceeded to Bond with the son of his most hated rival."
Draco chuckles "He always was rather hot-headed. I blame it on the red hair."
I smile, but I can tell it doesn't reach my eyes.
"Scorpius I really would like to speak with you for a moment." I repeat.
"Ok. Mum, Dad, sorry to spring the information on you like that but we felt you should be aware of the situation. We'll say goodbye before we leave, unless we end up staying the night…"
With that Malfoy gets to his feet and we both exit the library. He tries to hold my hand as we walk but I pull it out of his reach.
"Rose what is wrong? Your emotions are all over the place, you're all mad and suspicious and worried."
I don't reply until we reach his bedroom. And it' only as I turn toward him to unleash all the built up suspicion that I realise I remembered the way to his room on my own even though I've only been here once before, excepting my dreams of course.
"What did you mean when you told you Dad that he knew how long you'd had a thing for me?" I demand. His room is cold because his fire is unlit since he's been away and before he replies he flicks his wand to light the fire, which begin to crackle away merrily in the background.
"Why are you mad about that?" Malfoy counters "Does it really matter how long I've had a thing for you?"
"Yes. It does."
Scorpius scowls at me and crosses his arms over his chest. I try to ignore how handsome he is as I freak out about the fact that he may or may not have planned this whole thing from the beginning to end up with the two of us being bonded together.
"A while Rose. Longer than I admitted."
"How much longer?"
"I don't know Weasley, work it out!"
"What do you mean work it out?" I demand.
Scorpius is practically snarling at my questions, but is suspect that some of the anger he is feeling is catching through the bond as he picks up on my emotions.
"I mean that if you can't worth out that I've had it bad for you for a whole lot longer than this year than you're an idiot."
"How much longer than this year then Malfoy?"
"Since bloody fourth year!" he shouts at me, completely knocking me on my ass with that information.
"What?" I murmur in shock from my place where I have sunk down to sit on the end of his bed. "What do you mean you've had a thing for me since fourth year?"
Scorpius looks at me with an odd expression on his face and through the bond I can feel his confusion and wonder as he looks at me.
"You really have no idea at all do you? Rose, normal teenage boys don't use kissing as a tactic to piss someone off. Every time you've told the story of how I kissed you in fourth year after our shoving match you mention that I had an odd look on my face. And I probably did, but it was odd because I had you pinned against the wall and in spite of the fact that I started hating you in first year, by fourth year I'd realised how amazing you are and I'd noticed how pretty you were. So I looked odd because realised that the girl I'd hated had become the girl I had a crush on and I had her pinned against the wall as I'd seen so many of the sixth and seventh years do in Slytherin before kissing each other. I wanted to try it and you were the one I wanted to try it with."
"But you hated me after that. I hated you even more."
"And on some level I did hate you because you didn't catch on to the fact that I had a crush on you. But every time I saw you I went out of my way to argue with you just like a ten year old on the playground. And sometimes I would convince myself that you were just as mean and spiteful and would start fights with me the same way I did to you because you had a thing for me too. And I got meaner and meaner every time I realised that you still hated me as much as ever, if not even more."
I stare at him as though he has grown twelve heads and is attempting to eat me with all of them.
"Don't look at me like that Rose, I know it's messed up. And I tried to get over it in fifth year when I dated all those girls but it just didn't work because somehow when I wasn't fighting with you, I was fighting with them about you! It was driving me insane. And we kept getting into situations where we'd just end up kissing again, which only made it worse."
"So what you're saying here is you've been manipulating me all along and the fact that we've landed in this situation is entirely your fault?" I ask him.
"What?"
"Well, if you really had a thing for me since fourth year, then subconsciously or even consciously, you've probably been trying to direct the relationship between us to go from loathing to what we have now, right?"
"I guess so. I mean, I had a thing for you for years before I even managed to get you to stay in the room with me without us fighting. Which I might add wasn't until after we'd been shagging for a few months."
"Bet it bugged you every time I accused you of being obsessed with me and stalking me so that you were in all of my classes and whatnot, when you actually were." I say smirking.
"More than once I almost shouted at you that you were right but you're too stubborn to realise that I loved you. Hell, you're too stubborn to do anything unless you can rationalise it to yourself and realise for yourself that it's worthwhile. I nearly died when you actually agreed to meet me on top of the Astronomy Tower when I suggested we become fuck buddies."
"So tell me something, how long have you been planning this? Honestly? I mean, you told me that in fourth year your Dad noticed my locket and told you it was a Malfoy Heirloom. And I've been wearing the damn thing half my life. You've had a thing for me since fourth year. Seems and extreme coincidence that you had a thing for me and you're dad noticed my locket all in fourth year."
"What are you implying Rose?" Scorpius says sharply, his silver eyes boring into mine.
"How long did it take you to do your research on the locket?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that if I found out the person I had a thing for was wearing an old heirloom of my family that marked them as being mine I'd do as much research as I could to find out about it."
"What are you accusing me of here?"
"I want to know how long you've known that the tradition surrounding this locket entailed a whole lot more than just a gift passed down through the family."
Scorpius's eyes search my face for a long time as he looks at me and I can't help noticing everything about him. His eyes show his concern and the bond tells me of his worry and secrecy, his blonde hair is hanging in his eyes and that handsome face that I know better than my own watches me with a slight frown. His arms are still crossed over his chest and he leant against the wall of his bedroom.
And even as I can feel that he has been keeping something from me that will no doubt make me ridiculously angry, I can't help the little bubble of love that swells in my chest at the sight he makes.
"Are you accusing me of knowing that under the right circumstances this bond would form between us?"
"That's exactly what I'm accusing you of Malfoy."
"Why would you accuse me of that?"
"Why would you try to keep secrets from me about this? How long have you known that under the right circumstances, if you could manage to convince me to fall in love with you and have me say so whilst having sex and wearing this damned locket, a magical bond would form between us that ties us together so irrevocably? How long have you known and how much you kept from me?" I scream at him angrily.
Scorpius slowly moves towards me and I watch his moves the way a deer watches a bobcat stalk her, ready to bolt for it at any moment, or in this case ready to pull out my wand and hex him almost to oblivion.
"Rosie, don't be mad." Scorpius Malfoy murmurs softly in response.
