Ephemeral
Disclaimer: Nothing that you recognise is mine, it belongs to J.K Rowling.
He had always been taken in by beautiful things, it was the reason he had married his wife and it was the reason they only had one child, once you had all that beauty in a child you know that the next could not measure up, and it would be a terrible shame to ruin a beautiful family portrait with an ugly child. A problem that he knows will not arise with this child, stunning even though he is only a toddler. He is as pale as a petal, as pure and innocent as a white lily, he looks so perfect, so right, an ornament to put in your home, flowers in a vase of water, as long as he is just sitting there then nothing can be wrong.
Everyone says so, when guests stream through the house for party after party and he is kept awake until they are all gone, even though he is only a small child. They all exclaim that he is a flawless flower, so soft so delicate, the very moment when your eye first beholds its beauty and before you look closer. And he is always so well behaved, so silent, the perfect accessory to any household, a faultless statue that will shake your hand and who's hair you can ruffle. A toy that you can play with and behold at its sight, they will laugh and make faces at him and he will stand silently, straight in his vase, posture perfect, frozen in time and that is all that they will see.
But they only glance, because when you look closely at the surface of a flower, no matter how beautiful, you will find imperfections, because nothing in the world is perfect when you look closely, as long as all they do is glance then they will never know the truth of the errors. And somehow those imperfections found through careful inspections are worse than thousands of obvious imperfections, for when they are obvious they do not lie, they do not hide away and whisper maliciously as the lack of them is extolled. These blemishes are hidden away to fool people and win them over, the outward perfection is all a lie, an ugly vicious lie and the crashing disappointment when the lie is uncovered is more blinding than a rage.
The foolish child always let his emotions get in the way, he always flinches when they were in the dungeons with prisoners, the others never saw, always just assuming that his perfect impassive face was there, but he saw it. He knew that the child had compassion for those mudbloods and muggles, he saw when the child was friendly to the elves, he heard when the child asked why they all had to die, when the child said that he didn't want to kill people with bad blood. And he knew that his child could never be good enough, never perfect enough. He was too much the flower, with its hidden flaws that mar it to the core. The flower that was so wastefully mortal, always too easy to destroy too weak and fragile to ever have any worth.
As he begins to punish him, the lies continue, the child crumples so quickly under the snake headed cane, like tearing into a petal, one could destroy him and not even realise that they are doing it, until all that is left is a pile of shredded pieces, flowers always were ephemeral. But even lying on the floor, limbs askew and blood welling up in his cheek, he is still beautiful. His perfect appearance mocking the father and trying to force him to be sorry to have hurt something of such exquisiteness, it almost makes him guilty to have accentuated the whiteness of the skin with the harsh contrast of the rivers of red that run across his soft skin, he might feel in the wrong to see how much the child's eyelashes shimmer like fresh snow as he fights to keep his eyes open and to stay conscious. And as he strikes again for the child making him feel wrong for punishing the flaws he tries not to hear the perfectly tuned note of pain that spills from his cherry lips, he cannot hear it, because if he does then he may fall back into the trap of the false perfection and he cannot do that. In fact, the only way that he can continue to force out the imperfections from the shameful child is to bring them to the surface, he has to break that perfect façade so that he can see the multi-coloured defects from the inside of the child. He has to hit down hard enough and have the fangs dig in deep enough to distort that perfect noise into something so raw and primal that it can never be classed as beautiful.
And when the child is at that stage, where he can look upon the body and see no beauty, no perfection, when all he can see is the ugly scars that make up the truth of the small boy, when the flower is merely pulp, sodden and defeated to never make anything beautiful again. Then he can be happy that the ugliness of the lies are gone, what he sees is the truth, his child is flawed, his child will never be good enough, his child is a fake who never learnt his lines. Then he can hope, hope that maybe by exposing the truth to the world, it will accept them and draw them out of the small vessel and back into itself. Then maybe the child can be perfect, once all the flaws have been bled away the child can be perfect and emotionless, then the child can be passive and silent always, maybe the child will learn that all he can do is sit in his vase and watch, he is too fragile, too flower-like to allow him to become part of the world.
The truth is spelled away eventually, and the appearance of perfection is returned, the child placed back on the shelf.
And maybe he can be perfect.