The fact of the matter was that Draco was not very friendly. Try as he would, he had been raised as a prince in a big empty house, with only children around him who had been prearranged as friends. He was smart, and anyone could tell he would be handsome as he aged, but the marked introversion of babyhood had never left him. At best he could command others; at worst he was despised.
Lucius had never covered his Mark in front of his son. There was no point, because the moment he left the house the world would be full of rumors anyway. But it wasn't until he was rather old, 9 or 10, that he asked about it.
"Did that hurt?" Draco asked his father one morning when they were eating breakfast alone. The sleeves of Lucius's pajamas were rolled up, and he glanced down in surprise at his arm.
"This?" Lucius replied, pointing at his Mark. He had a personal taboo to never touch it still. As his wife loved to point out, it had really never faded, although to his own disgust, as he had gotten older it had stretched a bit unappealingly. Draco nodded.
"Do you understand what it is?" Lucius went on.
"A bit. Mummy said before you had me things were different, and you were in trouble for a while. Because of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."
Lucius hated that complex mouthful of words when "The Dark Lord" was so easy and reverent, but Draco had been coached by his mother to speak of their old master in the way everyone else would when he left the Manor's walls.
"That's right. I like to call him the Dark Lord, but you shouldn't say it in front of anyone but us, or your grandparents, or Professor Snape. He gave me this Mark a very long time ago because I was loyal to him. He died and we had to prove that we were innocent in order to keep living as we do."
Draco knew all of this; he had been sneaking in the attic, reading old newspapers.
"I just wanted to know if it hurt," he said.
"It did hurt, yes. It hurt a lot."
Draco returned to his bacon, satisfied, as his father ruminated on how they could ever maintain this delicate line with him. Lucius and Narcissa had never fed their son the lies they had told to keep Lucius out of Azkaban, but neither had they quite explained to him how much they had been, at one point, despised.
His mother had fits the summer leading up to Hogwarts. Really, she and his father had been having more than fits for years about him going at all. Somehow along the way Lucius had gotten the idea of Durmstrang into his head, a royal shock to Narcissa the first time she heard it.
"Who would hear of a Malfoy child, a Black child, going anywhere but Hogwarts?" she sniped at the first mention.
"Not a Malfoy, perhaps, but my mother's family –"
"And a fine way they turned out."
She had thought that would be the end of it. A few great-uncles did not a connection make. His mother was English, whatever fight she tried to put up about it. But Lucius could not release the idea. Karkaroff was writing him letters, and he tried to woo his wife with the idea of the finest Defense Against the Dark Arts training in Europe, unplagued by an ever-rotating staff.
"More like plain Dark Arts," she scoffed.
"I never knew you thought so ill of Dark magic."
"It's over now, Lucius. Let your son live a safe life, in Britain. Please."
She was cold to him after that, breezing around the house as if he weren't there. Draco noticed this, and looked at his father with strange new eyes for the few days it persisted.
"I can't understand why he persists in this idea," Narcissa told Severus. It was just a few weeks before Hogwarts letters were due to arrive, and she had invited Severus to lunch with her while Lucius took Draco to look at brooms. The two of them could never have enough of looking at every new model in excruciating detail, and then coming home and marking up the pages of the catalogs together in the broom shed.
Severus scoffed, and then seemed to think twice.
"Lucius is…looking for guidance," he said carefully.
"You want to say he's weak," she noted.
"Not weak, Narcissa. But you couldn't have thought he would give up the things he used to fight for."
"I am the thing he used to fight for," she snapped, "and he doesn't seem to care a bit that I want my son close by."
Lucius and Draco had just gotten back, and Lucius was glad as he silently passed the dining room that he had sent Draco to clean up first. He went on his way without alerting Narcissa and Severus to his presence; it was obvious enough he was not wanted.
The lunch turned into tea; at one point Draco ran in and showed Narcissa the little joke boxes Lucius had purchased him. You put a trinket, a coin or a leaf or whatever a child would have on hand into one, and then it would appear in the other. Narcissa let him use her wedding ring for the demonstration, and he had to hold onto his veneer of confidence very hard in front of Professor Snape after that. Of course they worked as she knew they would, and he was able to hand the precious object back to her with cool aplomb.
"You'll be very popular with those at school," she smiled, and sent him back out to his play. They saw him out in the garden after that, spacing the boxes farther and farther apart as he filled them with grass. She saw him pick up a grasshopper in cupped hands at one point, and then shake his head and release it.
"You're biting your nails, Sev," Narcissa pointed out at length.
He was, and he hated it. His relationship with the Malfoys had stayed firm all these years, although Narcissa's trust in him had really only come back recently; she needed him, and now he was finding he needed her.
"The Potter boy will be in Draco's class," he said, and Narcissa immediately reached out a hand to place on his knee. "It's been…I've been dreading it for 10 years. I suppose I don't know if it would be better or worse if she were still alive."
"He's just a boy," she soothed, although they both knew that wasn't true. "Focus on watching Draco for me. Merlin knows he'll need watching."
"Do you still love me?" Lucius asked his wife from across the sitting room a week or so later.
"No," she bit. She didn't turn. He smiled.
"I suspected as much. But I've decided he'll go to Hogwarts"
"Of course he will!" she said, throwing her hands up in the air. "As if you decided that alone. What a man –"
But he had already gone and engulfed her in his arms, and she had let him.
"We need to tell him everything before he goes," Lucius told her one night. A game of chess and a bottle of wine, both unfinished, sat before them. Draco had met Harry Potter earlier that day, alone, and to his great shock, the boy seemed very unimpressed by him. "Do you ever speak to him about Nymphadora, for one?
"That seems like an odd place to start with it all. He knows of her, I guess. My mother can't help but slip it into every conversation lately; I think she's forgetting they've been disowned. But she'll be in her 6th or 7th year now. It'll hardly come up."
"Yes, you never spoke to older students, did you?" he teased.
"Stop it. What else do you propose hasn't been elaborated upon enough in his interminable question and answer sessions?"
"Things about Bellatrix. Things about Sirius. How to react if he's asked. You know Sirius was –"
"I know what Sirius was," she cut him off. "You don't have to remind me that Sirius should have been more to Draco than he ever was to Harry Potter." Narcissa laid her head down on the card table. "Tell him anything you like tomorrow, then. He'll feel very important with all that attention and secret knowledge."
Lucius knocked on Draco's door early the next day, and took him on a walk through the hedgerows that did, as his mother had known it would, make him feel incredibly grown up. Lucius learned then just how much Draco had been absorbing and even researching on his own over the years; there was very little to tell, when all was revealed.
"Those skills should do you well in school," Lucius admitted, although it was twisted somehow into a negative light. "Your mother and I expect a lot of you, of course."
"Yes, Father."
"And you understand that being a Malfoy means you have a reputation to upkeep? There can't be any chatter about us, or at the very least it cannot emanate from you oversharing."
"Yes, Father."
They turned for home then, and Draco began to bash the shrubs with a stick. Somehow, time with his father always seemed to end in a life lesson that felt like a reprimand.
Just as the towers of the Manor were in sight, Lucius grabbed his son by the shoulder.
"One more thing, Draco. Do try your best with Harry Potter, and don't tell your mother I brought it up."
It was immediately apparent from Draco's first letter, still in somewhat disheveled boyish script, that Harry Potter was only his parents' son and nothing more. Special, perhaps, but Lucius had been a fool for counting on him. He nursed this wound alone, as Narcissa would only be validated in his correctness, and then he had to bear the sting of Draco's repeated mentions of the boy in every letter home and over every school holiday for the rest of his years at Hogwarts.
Hello everyone! I know I've said here before that you should check out my blog, but I've started a new one now where I really have been trying to post my thoughts as I work on chapter updates. I'd love for you to follow me and chat, it's xoxothesubwayfugitive on Tumblr!
The next chapter will have to be about the Chamber of Secrets - isn't that where we all fell in love with Lucius? ;)