By the time the weekend came, Rose had a considerable amount of work that had piled up. The match was in just a week, and James was scheduling what Rose felt were an absurd number of practices. She and Scorpius were sitting in the library early on Saturday afternoon when he cleared his throat loudly.

"I think we should talk," he said.

"About what?" Rose was only half-listening to him; she was halfway through the book on quintapeds, and fascination didn't even begin to describe how she felt about them - though the fact that she'd left her Herbology homework virtually untouched probably did.

"My family."

"Haven't we done that?" she asked, her attention still fixed on the book.

Scorpius reached across the table, extracted her bookmark from where it was trapped under her arm, and dropped it onto the page she'd just finished. He then made to close the book, though he did let her actually do so.

She looked up at him, feeling a little exasperated. "Scorpius, what's so urgent?"

The look on his face made any further protests die in her throat. He looked only a little more cheerful than a witch being marched off to the gallows. "I really want to talk to you about my family." She opened her mouth. "No, my dad's family. Look, Rose, I really, really like you, and I want to make sure now that this won't be a problem, because if it is and we don't find out until much later, it'll hurt a lot more."

Rose sighed and slumped back. She was not looking forward to this conversation, though she did know that he was right - it did have to happen. She could generally put his family out of her mind when she spent time with him, because she knew Scorpius didn't have any prejudices and she was pretty sure his mother didn't, either - one of her aunts was quite friendly with Astoria Malfoy.

But his grandparents - well, she'd bet galleons that his grandfather had tortured and probably even killed people exactly like her and her mother for the very serious crime of existing in the same world as him. He'd also personally given her aunt a dark object that should have killed her (and very nearly did), tortured several of her parents' closest friends, and been indirectly responsible for the death of her uncle's godfather. She wasn't so sure about Scorpius's grandmother, but she hadn't left his grandfather, even after Voldemort's downfall, so clearly she couldn't be that bothered by it all.

And when she thought about that, it was sometimes a little hard to keep liking Scorpius quite as much as she did, even if he himself hadn't done - and she was quite sure would never do - anything of the sort.

He was studying her. "You know I'm right."

Rose sighed heavily and began to stuff her books into her bag. "You are, unfortunately. I don't want to have this conversation here, though."

"Neither do I. We could go for a walk outside?"

That seemed as good a solution as any to Rose, who wanted as few witnesses as possible if she started yelling at him or broke down crying - either seemed like distinct possibilities. After a quick stop at Gryffindor Tower to drop off her bag, she met Scorpius in the entry hall and they stepped out into the cool late afternoon air. This time, they did not hold hands; it didn't seem fitting, given the topic of conversation and the potential fallout.

They settled on one of the hills that they took down to their Care of Magical Creatures classes; it seemed sufficiently far from the castle for their purposes, and it wasn't a particularly romantic spot if any other students wanted alone time for significant more enjoyable reasons.

Scorpius drew his knees up to his chest and stared out across the grounds. The very top of Hagrid's hut was just visible through the fine mist that hung in the air. "I'm not going to insult you by asking you to justify having a problem with them. If you want to talk about it, I'm happy to listen, but Albus has been my best friend for years and also, I'm not an idiot. I get it, and I don't blame you."

Rose crouched down in front of him. She'd never seen him look so serious, not even back when he was antagonizing her at every turn. It pulled at her heart a little, and she put her hands on his cheeks and leaned in for a kiss.

It wasn't a particularly chaste kiss, but they didn't get carried away the way they usually did, either. He raised his eyebrows at her.

"In case - you know."

He sighed. The little bit of light that had arisen in his face after the kiss vanished. "Yeah. I know."

She settled down next to him, close enough that they were almost touching - but not quite. Not yet.

"You don't get it," she said after a moment. "You understand why it bothers me, and I can tell that you're disgusted by what they did, but it's not the same thing. Scorpius, if he'd had half a chance twenty years ago, your grandfather would have literally killed me or tortured me until I was locked up in St. Mungo's for the rest of my life. It's not the same thing for you - I don't think the Death Eaters would have liked you very much, but you would have had a choice. Hell, it's your choices that are causing all the conflict with some of your housemates right now. Me and Hugo? My mum? My grandparents? We don't get to have a noble reason. It's just that we, you know, breathe the same air as them. Oh, and we were born."

She stopped to catch her breath. She'd said all of that very quickly. For a moment, it looked like Scorpius wanted to argue, but after a moment, he sighed.

"You're right," he said instead. "And it's not fair, and I hate it - but it's not the same."

The fact that he wasn't challenging her or trying to pretend that he did get it went a long way toward making her care what he had to say. "Okay. So what did you want to say?"

"I - I don't know. I think that there are some things about my family that maybe you should know. I was thinking about it, and I guess we do have a lot of family secrets. They're just… well, all really depressing." He looked at her and held her gaze. "Rose, if I'm going to tell you this, I really need you to promise that you won't tell anyone. Not your brother, not James, not anyone. Noah knows most of it, and Albus knows a lot of it, but even them - there's some stuff they don't know." She opened her mouth and he added, "It's not recent."

She noticed that he'd skirted nicely around the question of whether what he was about to tell her was legal, and she didn't think it was an oversight, but she nodded anyway. "Okay. I promise. No one."

He sighed and looked away from her again. "It's not like I've gotten a play-by-play from anyone, so this might come out a little garbled… and there are plenty of things that I don't know about at all."

"That's okay." Rose wasn't going to go so far as to comfort him, not over this, but she was curious enough - and if she was being honest with herself, she also liked him enough - that she was willing to do with a garbled and incomplete picture.

"Our last lesson in Defense Against the Dark Arts before Christmas last year was about the Unforgivable Curses. Do you remember that?"

Rose did, vaguely.

"Well, I went home, and I was talking about them. Part of it was just that I was curious and not really thinking, but if I'm being honest, a lot of it was that I knew my dad had seen them during the war." He winced at the memory. "So I pushed it. He told me he didn't want to talk about it, and - well, I was a bit of a brat, and I kept bringing it up. Dad's always had a bit of a temper, but he usually just gets really quiet, goes into his study, and locks the door. This time, though - well, he started yelling at me. I don't remember everything he said, but the basic gist was that I couldn't understand, he hoped I'd never have to, and that I was too young to be thinking about this stuff anyway. Then he called me spoiled and slammed the door to his study."

He shook his head. "Mum talked to me later that night, once we'd both cooled down a little, and… well, after that I felt like a complete jerk."

"What did she say?"

Scorpius swallowed hard. "She said that those were a sore topic for my dad because during the war, he was surrounded by all three. A lot."

Rose couldn't keep a sarcastic comment back. "Well, yeah, because his side was using them."

"That's what I thought she meant, too, but it wasn't. He didn't just see them used - she said he knew the Imperius Curse and the Cruciatus Curse from both sides of the spells."

Rose felt her eyebrows knit together. "Wait, what? Who used them on him?"

"His father. His aunt. Voldemort himself, once. I think his dad used the Imperius Curse, his aunt used both, and Voldemort used the Cruciatus Curse." He gave a humorless laugh. "Yeah, once Mum told me that, I started to get why my grandmother lied for your uncle."

"His own father?"

"I guess my dad was dragging his feet about using the Cruciatus Curse on someone he'd gone to school with or something, and his father didn't want to argue with him in front of his aunt, so he just…" Scorpius waved an imaginary wand. "Yeah. Apparently, that happened a couple times."

"Same aunt?" He nodded. "She sounds terrible."

Scorpius managed a strangled laugh. "Yeah. Thank your grandmother for killing her for me long before I was born - I'm glad I never had the pleasure of meeting her."

"Hold on," Rose said, racking her brain. "Wait. Was your dad's aunt Bellatrix Lestrange?"

"Yep. My grandmother's sister. My dad said she was really unhinged, even for somebody who'd been in Azkaban. I think even my grandmother wasn't too broken up when she died - but then, I guess when your sister tortures your son, you tend to side with your son."

Rose shook her head. "How is this supposed to make me feel okay about your family? It's very sad and all, but you'll forgive me if I feel a little worse for the people he was seeing the curses used on and using the curses on — which is so gross, by the way."

"I know."

"It sucks that he had them used on him, but my sympathy is kind of with the real victims, not the bystanders or supporters who kind of didn't like it too much. You side with those people, you're going to get burned sometimes, too. And besides, your father used Unforgivables when he wasn't under the Imperius Curse, too. I know that."

Scorpius sighed. "I'm not trying to make you feel bad for him. Hell, I don't think he'd want you to feel bad for him - that's why he hasn't really talked to anyone but my mother about it. She said he doesn't think he's really entitled to get sympathy about it, since he came out of the war relatively unscathed, all things considered… and, well, since he'd been part of that."

"Your mother told you an awful lot, for something that was supposed to be super secret." Rose tried to keep the skepticism out of her voice, but she didn't quite succeed.

"Yeah, well." He picked at a few blades of grass. "She'd had a few drinks by that point, and I don't think she's ever really talked about it, either. Not his stuff or hers. Once she started, I think it just… spilled out."

"What do you mean?"

He was biting his lip now. "You can't ever tell anyone this."

"I won't. I promise." He hesitated, so she put a hand on his knee. He jumped a little at the contact, which he clearly hadn't been expecting. "Scorpius. I promise. Not anyone."

Scorpius swallowed hard. "Not even Albus or Noah." She nodded. He thought about it for a minute. "Okay," he said, clearly making his decision. "Okay. So after what my mum said about my dad, I said something like the Imperius Curse sounding - well, almost scarier, you know?"

Rose did know. She didn't know how bad the Cruciatus Curse hurt, but being a slave in her own body sounded positively terrifying.

"So I said that, and my mum got this look on her face. And then she said that she didn't know what the Cruciatus Curse felt like, but that the having the Imperius Curse cast on her was the worst experience she'd ever had - and she definitely got punished in that year the school was taken over, so it's not like she doesn't have a benchmark for pain. She's got these… scars on her shoulders and arms. I don't know what from, but I know they're from then. She's opened up a little more lately about that stuff - I guess she figures she was as old as I am now when it happened, so…"

"Who used it on her? The Imperius Curse, I mean?"

"She wouldn't say, but… oh, I really didn't mean to tell you this. You don't have an issue with the Greengrasses in the first place." He looked up at the sky. "I - okay, but you really can't tell anyone this."

"I won't."

He looked up at the sky and then said, so softly she had to strain to hear him, "I think maybe it was my aunt. That's why I haven't even talked to Noah about it - I can't really accuse his mother of that. It's just my gut, really. My mum was a Ravenclaw, you know, and she wanted to fight with your uncle and parents. Their older brother, my uncle, he did - he got the word and came back for it."

Now that was something about the Greengrasses that Rose hadn't known. Her respect for them grew a little more.

"Yeah… Daphne was a bit of a black sheep for awhile, buying into the pureblood stuff like she did. But I've never understood why my mother had to go back - because it's clear that she did, but it was only later, only with her brother. She's been really specific about that. But she was already at Hogwarts - why did she evacuate in the first place, if she wanted to fight so bad?

"And then I got to thinking. I mean, my mum swore me to secrecy in general, but she specifically told me not to tell Noah about it. And she wouldn't say anything about the person who did it. And then it occurred to me that my aunt was there, too. She was a seventh year. And I can see her using that to just get Mum out of the castle. She'd think she was doing the right thing, even. It's just a theory, but…"

Rose wasn't sure what to say. On one hand, she did appreciate Scorpius opening up to her about something that was clearly very difficult for him… but on the other, none of this was really giving her a reason to be okay with his father's family - though she couldn't help but think that maybe he wasn't so different from his mother in needing to get it out to someone, so she tried to be patient.

"Anyway." Scorpius shook himself. "They have nightmares about it, you know."

"So do my parents. Don't most people?"

"Yeah, I guess. I just - when I was really little, it was my dad especially, he'd wake me up shouting in the middle of the night. A lot. I don't know if it got better or if they just used some charm to muffle the sounds coming from their room. You know how most kids climb into bed with their parents when they're little, sometimes, if they have a bad dream?"

Rose nodded.

"I wasn't allowed to. Ever. My parents would come sit in my room until I fell asleep again, but I couldn't sleep in there. I didn't think much of it - you know, being four and all - but now, I'm wondering… like, maybe they were afraid it would scar me, or even that it wasn't really safe."

He sighed, and this time, Rose did reach out to clasp his hand. She was starting to see where he might be going with this, and while she was far from convinced, she did appreciate the obvious effort it was taking him to talk about this. She wondered if he'd ever really talked about it to anyone. Whatever he said about Noah and Albus, she suspected that he hadn't.

"My dad really hated the war, Rose. Like - really. I don't remember going to my grandparents' manor until I was about eight, and then my mother took me. I don't think I saw my father step foot into it until I was 11 - just before I went to Hogwarts. I don't know what he'll do with it when my grandparents - well, you know. I can't imagine he'll ever want to live there."

"You keep saying your dad hated it," Rose said. "And I believe you. But if he hated it that much, why didn't he just leave? He was on their side, I can't imagine he was under lock and key."

Scorpius shook his head. "I don't know. I wish I did. I would've. I would've gone to - to Albus's, or just… somewhere. Not stayed there. He must have known somebody who was in the Order who he could've gotten to, and I bet they'd have helped him. I just don't get it. It's not something I can really ask, though - not right now, anyway."

Rose shook her head. "Scorpius - I like you. I do. But… forget your grandparents. What about your dad? How can you use those curses on people, especially when they've been used on you so you know how terrible they are?"

He frowned. "I'm - I'm not sure he did. After they were used on him, I mean. He said something, when he was ranting at me - something about how it's impossible to know what they are until you've felt them, and then nobody with half a soul uses them on someone else."

Rose wondered, suddenly, whether Scorpius's father had had those curses used on him more than Scorpius's mother had implied. She knew her uncle and mother had both been on the receiving end of Unforgivables several times during the war, but when Rose and James and Albus had asked about them one night, their parents had definitely hedged a little in the face of their childrens' insistence that good guys would never, ever use them.

"I don't know," Scorpius said. "I don't know a lot of things. But I know my dad, and I know that my dad as I know him would never, ever do those things. He's worked to change a lot of the laws, you know."

Rose actually had known that; her father had complained about Draco Malfoy infringing on her mother's territory before. Her mother had informed him in a tone that invited no dissent that it wasn't a competition.

"I just… I know they'd like you, both of them, and they'd never in a million years do anything to hurt you. Even if there was another dark wizard - they'd both fight. I mean, he married my mum, didn't he?" Scorpius's voice was a little pleading. "You don't do that if you still believe that stuff. And ask Albus. He likes them."

"He did some terrible things."

"I know," Scorpius said. "And I understand why you feel the way you do. But - I mean, I didn't. And I wouldn't, ever. And - I mean, if we work out, I'll want you to meet my mother at some point, but I won't push you to meet my father if you don't want to, and I promise that I will never ask you to spend any time with his parents." He stared out across the grounds. "And - yeah, I never did any of that. Ever."

"And I didn't do anything to make them hate me. Welcome to a world where your bloodline is sometimes a problem even if you've done absolutely nothing to anyone."

He thought about that for a minute. "Yeah, it sucks. I didn't think I could hate those - those people more than I do, but… this feels gross, and it's not even life-threatening. I'm sorry. You don't deserve it."

The fact that he was continuing to not press or challenge her was, at this point, making Rose feel a lot better about him. She wasn't totally sure where she stood - his revelations, while interesting and sad, had left a little to be desired in terms of making her okay with his family - but at least he seemed to genuinely respect where she was coming from.

"We can try it," she told him. "I don't know. But - I'll try, as long as you don't push me to spend quality time with murderers."

He managed a genuine smile for the first time since he'd started talking. It was small, but it was there. "Thanks. Because I really do like you a lot."

"So I'd gathered," Rose said dryly. "Have you even told them about us?"

"Of course," Scorpius said. "They said… well, a lot of stuff, and I don't want to go into it right now - I'm feeling kind of drained, honestly - but none of it was bad."

Rose wanted to push him, but confiding in her really did seem to have left him absolutely exhausted, so she let it go.

For now.

A/N: Oof.

So this is a completely new chapter that covers stuff that wasn't even remotely included in the story before this edit. I felt like it was something I'd skirted around before that I shouldn't have, and I wanted to remedy that.

But... I also know that people have very, very different headcanons about Draco Malfoy, what happened to the Malfoys during the war, and how they changed (or didn't change) after the war. I intentionally left a lot open and unclear here, because Scorpius clearly isn't privy to all the information his father or mother have, but I'm still a little nervous about how it came off, because I feel like my interpretation of Draco's actions in HBP and DH are a little more sympathetic than they are for most people. (I look at him and see someone who showed some pretty significant signs of serious trauma - I've always really wondered what happened to him off-screen, and he's struck me as someone who was running his mouth throughout his childhood and adolescence without actually realizing what the things he was saying meant.)

So I'd really love to know how this scene came off to you. Was I too sympathetic? Does Scorpius know too much? Were there things you would have liked to see addressed that weren't? (Especially this - I'll touch a little more on Draco in CINAS before I'm done, but Scorpius's family is going to be an issue that gets dealt with a lot when I edit/continue The Wrinkles of the Road. At that point, Scorpius will be 19 or 20, so it's quite conceivable that he'd know more - so tell me if there's something specific you'd like to see!)

Yeah. So reviews on this would be hugely appreciated, and I really hope you liked it.

- Branwen