A tear hit the floor, then a second, he wasn't crying for him, he was crying for her, because she had truly loved him, she of course thought he was crying for him. "Just think on all the good memories of your father." Those were her words to him, his sweet, delusional mother. She loved her son, yet she still had the ability to fool herself into believing him distressed by the man's death.
"What good memories?" He muttered to himself, tromping up the stairs; sending the house elves scampering off in fright.
In his room he allowed himself to fall face forward on the bed, giving into the exhaustion that had been plaguing him for what seemed like forever. The cold reality was that he didn't have a single memory of his father that wasn't marred by some nastiness or another, foul words, sharp blows, and those constituted the more pleasant ones. His mother always said that he was only trying to push his son to greatness. He didn't blame her, she wasn't aware of the…other happenings, how could she be.
His father had been a demanding man, and his discipline had been more than strict. It wasn't the physical abuse that had shattered his childhood; it had been those dark nights of unspeakable horrors at his father's hands. Horrors were what he called them as a naïve child; he knew what they were now.
Oddly enough the memories of these nights were some of his clearest, the sound of his door opening, the heavy footsteps, and the voice pleading with him to cooperate quietly, the hands on his skin, the pain and the terrible pleasure. What transpired between father and son on those nights left a stain on his life that could never be washed clean. This was the legacy left to Draco, memories of hell.