A/N Two more installments and this story will be over. O-V-E-R!
Any confusion over pronouns in reference to the child is purely intentional. I want to show how utterly confused and mixed-up she is, post-birth.
It was thirty-six of hours of agonizing labor. The irony was not lost on me that it took a day and a half to deliver what it probably took us two and a half minutes to conceive. You were never one for prolonged sessions, Malfoy, just multiple encounters, waking me up when I had left myself, bringing me back to consciousness.
Maximize humiliation, minimize effort. Isn't that the Malfoy family motto?
The MediWitch who delivered it said that she had never seen such a large child delivered from such a small person. I was bleeding profusely, she repeated over and over as my mother held my hand. The child must have done some some damage as I strained to bring him outside of my body, to isolate him from myself - as I strained to be a separate entity once more.
Leave it your offspring to be more trouble than its worth, Malfoy.
All I wanted to do was sleep once I had expelled it from me body, Gods, all I wanted was a moment of peace. I just wanted to close my eyes, and let it be dark for a moment - and silent for just a moment - but all I heard was the squalor that you produced. I just wanted a moment of thoughtless repose - not have your ferret-face housed in my dreams or that thing haunting me from somewhere in my womb. It was another person now, an individual, I gave it life for God's sake, you'd think that would suffice - but it cried, it cried for so long.
The MediWitch said that it was hungry, that even after my ordeal, I needed to feed it. She was quite horrified when I said I didn't want it anywhere near me. She spoke to my mother in a corner and called it "the earliest instance of post-partum depression she'd ever seen."
I was not going to let it latch onto to my breast and allow my body to nourish something I never wanted in the first place. That thing is your progeny.
Somewhere in the beginning of this pregnancy, I tried so desperately to love it. I wanted to be a good mother, despite the fact that I was a teenager. I could also be a good, caring mother.
After all, I reasoned, children were born of rape all the time, and somehow those victims allowed themselves to care for the product of that violation.
I am not most victims, though, Malfoy, but I am a victim, as is this child that never asked to born or be conceived - but this does not make me empathize with it. It does not allow me to feel sympathy or even minutely maternal towards this thing that happened to live in my body for nine months.
It is apart of you, the ultimate pawn in your game of sadistic revenge to ruin my life. You upped the ante in this pathetic competition you have with your father. Your father quite capably knocked up my mother, and so you will do the same because a son will always do as well - if not better - than his father.
It took me three hours, but I did eventually ask to see the child.
I didn't want to see it as much as I wanted to stare at this thing that had caused me so much grief for the last nine months. Was it the monster I imagined it to be?
My mother brought it to me and asked me if I wanted to hold it.
I politely declined and asked her to hold it up three yards away from the bed.
And it did, oh, Gods, it looked like you. It had your blonde hair and the thinnest nose I had ever seen. The most sullen cheeks and palest reflection. I was convinced my mother would know it was your child in that moment when I wailed and started sobbing as it was doing in her arms. I pictured you in that moment, grunting, moving over me as I lay there helpless, imagining that moment when you released into me, creating that…
I couldn't take it, I broke in that moment, and started yelling so loudly that the child could not be heard over me. It was here, it was in my house, it was you all over again. It looked like you, and I never wanted him, and he had blonde hair, and I could imagine him smirking, and he came from my body, its fists were flying in the air - those tiny fists, and I didn't want it near me or around me - I just needed him out of the room.
The child was you. The child is you. You no longer visit me nightly, but I have that living two rooms away. It's hard to describe. Beyond the fact that I have it in the Burrow, I also have the images, the memories of you, and it's conception living in my thoughts and dreams and memories.
I haven't held it or gone near it in three weeks.
You aren't here, Malfoy, but for all intents and purposes, you are here. I don't need you here physically. You've already infiltrated me enough to create you when you're not here.
Job well done.
Like you, I view it as the Plague.
Except the Plague was eventually eradicated.
Your family line has been propagated, your lifeline will continue indefinitely through this child.
Through this child, you will never be extirpated. Even if no one else knows that it belongs to you, I will know that I bore your heir, your spawn.
A living reminder of what you did to me.
An innocent product of your obsession with my ruination:
A reminder of what I used to be - before I met you.
