Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
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Draco talks to baby Hypatia all the time. He tells her about the routine for the day as he bathes and then dresses her: how they're going to go to the Grangers' and they will visit Madam Granger—and she likes Madam Granger, doesn't she? he certainly does—and then they will take a long stroll in the rose gardens of the Manor. There will be the nice smell of the roses and maybe they will see some Kneazles. If they do, she isn't to chase them. (He warns her about this even though she hasn't yet even shown an interest in crawling. One can't start too early.) Kneazles don't like to be chased, and she'll do well to notice what happened the last time her cousin Teddy chased Crookshanks, who is only part Kneazle.
Bathing she likes; dressing she doesn't. She wiggles; it seems there's always an extra arm to be guided through a sleeve. It's even worse when he has to dress her in Muggle clothes rather than traditional long shirt and over-robe, because then there are extra legs to worry him as well.
He points out birds winging their way across the summer sky outside the nursery window, and the occasional neighbor taking a morning broomstick ride. Of course, she can't see the Thestrals, but he points them out anyway, and tells her that she's lucky she can't see them. He hopes it's a long time before she looks on the face of death.
Madam Granger's books have reassured him that talking to the baby like this does not mean that he's going mad. It's good for the baby, so the books say, even if those books concern themselves only with baby Muggles. A baby witch or wizard isn't easily distinguishable from a baby Muggle in the first two years, except in rare cases. (His mother still smiles proudly when she tells him that he had his first wild magic at eighteen months.)
But it's Madam Granger who really reassures him, by commending the baby on the brightness of her eyes and the alertness of her demeanor. Hypatia seems to take after her cousin Teddy, because she's begun grasping things. The first thing was his nose. The second was a handful of his hair, which he'd carelessly forgotten to tie back before beginning her bath.
This morning his hair is swept back and fastened at the nape with a silver clasp that had been his father's. It's grown out since it was cropped for Azkaban and the trial, but as yet it's barely long enough to make a queue.
Madam Granger said that if he finds himself worried about the baby's progress, he might ask for a recommendation at the clinic; they would certainly not object if he wanted to take the baby to a pediatrician—but that is rather more than he is ready to do. Muggle healers strike him as inexpert; after all, they don't use wands, and they can't re-grow bones in a night, so he is not prepared to trust his baby sister to their ministrations. Even if she proves a Squib, she's still no Muggle.
Madam Granger did not argue with him, merely looked at him with her witch's eyes and let the matter drop.
He and Hypatia wake late, and alone, at the Manor most days. His mother rises early, and works in the rose garden. She feeds the peacocks; she's put up barriers around her roses to keep them out, the only concession to his father's absence, but she gives them free reign outside her own domain. When Hypatia is bathed and dressed, she is presented to her mother for the first feeding of the day.
This morning his mother is arranging the room that faces the terrace and the gardens, in order to receive their guests. When the doors to the terrace are opened, the room will fill with summer air and softly shaded sunlight and the smell of roses. By common agreement, the tour of the house will not include its deeper reaches, even though the formal dining room and the drawing room have been re-decorated since the trials.
Hypatia does not like the Manor, especially at night; he takes her for walks in Muggle London until she falls asleep. During the day he is out and about with her, for he has a courtesy stop in Diagon Alley two or three days a week. His renegade Aunt Andromeda expects him for eleven o'clock tea at her book shop. The Death Eaters burned her shop during the war, but with help from the Ministry and the reconstruction fund, she has re-established her business in its old place next to Flourish and Blott's. She deals in Muggle books, which along with other faces of Muggle culture, have excited rather a lot of curiosity since the war. Increasingly, the morning tea ceremony would be stolen time if two or three of the customers didn't join them and chat about what they are reading.
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He knew of Andromeda but only by name. She arrived at the Muggle hospital just after Hypatia was born, and the doctors didn't hesitate to admit her to his mother's bedside. Who summoned her or what she said he doesn't know, only that he was sent to sit in the hall with Granger while the two sisters talked for rather a long time.
When she emerged, she took them to the hospital visitor's tea room, where she formally introduced herself as his mother's sister. All he could think was how much she looked like Aunt Bellatrix, who is dead, a voice in his head repeated, dead and damned, but not before she damned me as well.
In spite of the family resemblance, Andromeda Black Tonks is far more like Madam Granger than she is like Bellatrix Lestrange,. She is brisk and sensible and that's comforting. Aunt Aundromeda was the first to have treated him like a grownup in all of these proceedings. Granger-the-younger, Hermione (the given name still feels awkward in his mind, and yet more on his lips), judged him on his first reaction and brushed him aside as a useless child who was having hysterics. Of course, she's a Muggle-born, so giving birth in a Muggle hospital is a perfectly reasonable thing in her view.
It wasn't until after Granger departed for an appointment elsewhere that his aunt had the talk with him.
"Your mother is in a bad way," Andromeda said, looking him right in the eyes. "You are the Heir of the House of Malfoy, and that's going to mean something rather different than you've been led to think."
He nodded, because he thought he already knew that. He and his newborn sister are the last bearers of the Malfoy name. Lucius Malfoy's last act as a citizen of wizarding Britain had been to change the terms of transmission for that name; he would seem to have had little confidence in his son's marriage prospects. Whether by marriage to the son or the daughter of the house, the name will continue.
Not that anyone would want it now, he thought, and squelched the thought.
"If you're not prepared to take responsibility," she said, "I'll see about adopting her."
He bridled at the notion, and of course his father would have more than objected at the idea of his daughter becoming Hypatia Tonks (that dreadful, Mugglish surname, that sounds like a bolt dropping into a tin bucket). That adoption would have made her the posthumous sister of the Metamorphmagus who married the werewolf…
"Absolutely not," he said.
"Then you are prepared to be her foster-father?" Andromeda asked. "And that means father in the full sense of the word."
He had no idea what that meant, of course, when he said yes.
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He has sent regrets to Aunt Andromeda this morning, of course, because he's going to be at the Manor all day, with his mother and the Grangers and Neville Longbottom, who is inseparable from his fiancée (so he reads the situation) but may also have wangled an invitation by virtue of his competence in Herbology. His mother has been complaining about something terrifying that has taken root in the formal gardens and eaten some of the wild Kneazles as well as a number of the peacocks.
He saw Longbottom's eyes light up at the prospect of identifying it and possibly transplanting it to the Hogwarts greenhouses, and thought, he looks just like that oaf Hagrid in Care of Magical Creatures, delighted with the temporary custody of a clutch of Blast-Ended Skrewts.
Actually he isn't sure if oaf really is the right characterization of Hagrid; perhaps madman might be fairer. He still can't shake the constant apprehension he felt in that class, the class on which his father had insisted because the Heir to the Manor needed to know about magical creatures. He still remembers Blaise Zabini rolling about giggling when he found out it was really about the white peacocks, which are such a Malfoy family hallmark that it's quite surprising that they don't in fact appear on the family crest.
On the other hand, Hypatia is delighted by the peacocks; she answers their unearthly shrieks with squawks of her own, which invariably leads to an unholy racket as they answer in kind, no doubt to correct her accent.
He gathers her up, shoulders the bag with the baby things (should she need distraction while at the Grangers') and takes his wand in hand to Apparate. The reply to his Owl, in Granger's hand, assures him that he'll be welcome at breakfast.
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Author's note: The notion that the peacocks are the reason for hapless Draco's presence in Hagrid's class I owe to Silver Sailor Ganymede; see her amusing little fic 'Creature Comforts.'