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daphnewritings · 4 years ago

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Chapter 10: A Father’s Past

Summary: Draco has too many questions and not enough answers. Also, Theo is a cutie

Warnings: Small joke about wanting to die rather than write a paper (if you’re not into that humor, soz), Lucius Malfoy is a creep

Word Count: 5.2k

- Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 -

The rest of the holiday break passed in slow monotony with Draco organizing and reorganizing his room to fit all his new presents into just the right places. He practiced a bit on his new Nimbus 2000, but it just wasn’t as fun without friends around to join him. He thought more than a few times about walking to Theo’s, but remembered the reception his mother had received when he was younger and he discarded the idea. He contemplated sending a note with Pollux, but didn’t want to know what Theo’s grandmother might do if she found out her grandson had become friends with the Malfoy’s son despite her best efforts, and cast aside that plan as well.

Draco wondered once or twice if he should send a note to Pansy, but he had a feeling that she would rather turn Pollux into a teacup than read about how miserable he was.

And that was the truth, the one thing that Draco could have never foreseen when he had tried so hard to needle Potter about going home for the holidays. After spending nearly every day surrounded by friends and learning fantastic new things in his classes for the last three and a half months at Hogwarts, Draco was bored out of his mind sitting around the Manor with nothing to do but mope around and count down the days until school started again.

There was also the fact that Draco Malfoy was, inexplicably, lonely. He had never truly felt lonely in the Manor before now, but he hadn’t had friends before to miss.

Or rather, any friends that were worth missing.

He hadn’t known what it was like to want to tell someone else how his day was going or to actually want to know how they were in return. He had never wanted to share himself with anyone else before Hogwarts. Being stifled in the Manor day in and day out, with no one but his mother to talk to and his father to drag attention out of made him want to start shattering priceless family heirlooms, regardless of what his father might do. At least it would get some sort of reaction out of Lucius besides the “good morning” and the “good night” he was awarded with every day.

The night before he was to board the Hogwarts Express and return to school, Draco found himself staring at the bust of his great-uncle Brutus in the middle of the art gallery, seriously thinking up a plan to break off his great ugly nose, when he heard a scratching from down the hall. Curious, he followed the noise down the hall to the dark music room where a number of instruments sat under white sheets to protect them from dust. Once upon a time, his mother had forced him to learn how to play the piano that was in the corner and he hadn’t been half bad, but he had also despised every second of it.

She had said it was because he had inherited her father’s long, thin, pianist hands, but Draco had a sneaking suspicion she just wanted to justify the outrageous purchase of the baby grand piano. He supposed he should just be thankful she hadn’t thought he had the hands of a harpist, which was one of the other hulking covered shapes in the room.

The scratching became louder as he weaved his way between the musical instruments interspersed throughout the room to the set of bay windows. Drawing aside the curtains, he looked out into the moon-bleached yard and smiled down at the mid-sized barn owl that was sitting on the ledge. It cocked its head to the side in what could only be interpreted as irritation and flapped its wings as if to emphasize how long it had been waiting for someone to notice it.

Draco unlatched the window and allowed the bird to hop down onto the window seat, not really caring if it got feathers or snow everywhere. He kneeled before it and allowed the owl a few seconds to get acquainted with its surroundings before he untied the small scroll tied to its leg. He’d learned when he was younger not to rush owls when Pollux had nearly bitten the tip of his thumb off when he had been too eager to see what he had brought him.

This owl seemed amiable enough as it simply stuck its leg out after a few seconds, giving Draco easy access to the message tied to its ankle.

Unrolling the message quickly, Draco stepped away from the bird as it started to preen and read:

Dear Draco,

I’ve been thinking about sending you a note with Lucy ever since break started, but when you didn’t send anything, I realized you were probably spending time with your family and didn’t want to get in the way of that. But since we’re down to the last few days of break, I realized it was now or never. When are you heading back to Hogwarts? I hope its tomorrow. I figured we could keep each other company if you want.

Send your reply back with Lucy. She likes to bring me all the mail since I give her extra treats, the fat old bird.

Miss you,

Theo

Draco felt like putting his head through the wall. “I’m such an idiot,” he mumbled to himself as he scanned the room around him for an ink pot and quill. Lucy clicked her beak in seeming agreement and Draco made a face at her before turning to rush out of the room. He made it all of one step and realized that he couldn’t just leave the owl alone. She might leave something more lasting than a few feathers. Huffing his annoyance, he doubled back and coaxed Lucy onto his arm with the promise of owl treats in the near future.

Peeking out into the hall, he slipped silently out of the music room on stockinged feet. Not for the first time in his life, Draco cursed the meandering nature of the halls throughout the house. He could never see what was waiting around the corner, just out of sight. And he could rarely tell when someone was coming up behind him, like-

“Draco? What are you doing?”

Fuck.

Draco slid to a stop, causing Lucy to flap her wings indignantly as he turned around at the sound of his father’s voice. “Uh.” His father just arched one dark brow, shuffling the papers in his hands as he stalked past Draco.

Wondering if it was too late to slide backward into the music room and pretend this hadn’t happened, his father’s slightly irked voice called to him from down the hall, effectively cutting off escape. Seeing no other option but to follow in his father’s wake, he looked to Lucy apologetically, “Sorry, it looks like you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for the treats, old bird.” Lucy cocked her head and blinked at him, clicking her beak at the audacity.

Draco hurried down the hall to walk beside his father, putting on an air of disinterest. “One of my friends just sent an owl. He wanted to know when I would be taking the train back to Hogwarts. I was just trying to find a quill and ink to reply to him.”

“Which friend? Is it Vincent or Gregory?” his father asked absently, still staring down at the page in front of his nose.

Draco felt a tightness wind itself around his chest as he coughed, both to dispel his sudden unease and to give himself time to think. There was no harm, surely, in telling his father that he had become friends with Theo. He had been careful to not mention him thus far to his parents, but that was only because he hadn’t wanted to remind his mother of the incident with Theo’s grandmother. It had nothing to do with what had been hinted at about Theo’s history being somehow tied to his own family’s past at the start of term feast.

Nothing at all.

Draco realized that, for the first time in days, he didn’t want his father’s full undivided attention on him. Not about this. But as his gait started to slow, Draco registered that he still hadn’t replied to his father’s question and he needed to say something, anything, fast. Despite the twisting feeling in his chest about having to give up this secret of his, Draco said quickly, “No, the owl was from Theodore Nott.”

His father slowed to a stop in front of Draco and turned, a half smile in the place of the usual flat, disinterested line of his mouth. “Draco, you made friends with the Nott boy and didn’t mention it earlier?”

“Well, I figured with how the interaction went between mother and his grandmother, it wouldn’t be a friendship that you and mother would approve of.”

“Nonsense!” Lucius proclaimed and Draco couldn’t keep the look of surprise off his face.

“But, father, after mother and I went to the Nott residence I assumed that the discouragement of any sort of relationship was mutual between our two families.”

Lucius chuckled lightly, squeezing Draco’s shoulder as they walked side by side down the hall. “You assumed wrong then, my son. The Nott’s and our family have shared much history together, and that batty old witch only delayed the inevitable connection between you too.”

“History?” Draco croaked. “What history?”

Draco stole a glance up at his father who had a small sort of secret smile playing around his mouth that was there and gone in an instant. “Oh yes, our two families go quite far back.” Once they reached the door that opened into his father’s private office, Lucius pulled out his straight, black wand, already topped with the snake head that went with his cane, and tapped the tip of it against his palm.

Lucius sighed, reminiscent. “It’s too bad that we won’t have more time tomorrow morning for you to tell me all about what you two get up to while at Hogwarts. I remember, when I was at school, Sebastian and I-” he was cut off by the flap of Lucy’s wings again from where she was still perched on Draco’s arm. “Perhaps that is a story for another time,” he hummed, waving his wand wordlessly at the locked door. There was a soft click and the door swung open.

Draco followed right behind him, still mystified at his reaction. When Draco had mentioned Pansy and Blaise a week or so ago when his mother had asked about any new friends he’d made at Hogwarts over breakfast, his father had quickly resumed reading page six of the Daily Prophet. He had shown more interest in what Crabbe and Goyle were up too, something that Draco would never understand, since his stories about Blaise and Pansy had more pizzazz to them, even if he did have to gloss over Theo’s part in them.

Crabbe and Goyle were just, well, Crabbe and Goyle. There wasn’t much too them.

Draco was shaken out of his musings by his father sliding a capped pot of ink and a quill in his direction, and Draco quickly scribbled out a reply on the back of Theo’s note:

Leaving tomorrow as well. See you on the train.

Missed you too,

Draco

Draco quickly retied it to Lucy’s leg, which she had obediently already stuck out for him, and then he brought her over to the window his father had already unlatched for him. Once she had flown over the tall hedges and out of sight, Draco turned back to his father, several questions already dancing on his tongue, but he swallowed them all in favor of looking around the room.

It wasn’t often that he was allowed in here, mainly because his mother insisted that his presence within the room would only distract his father from the work he was doing. What that “work” entailed, Draco had never been able to find out since it wasn’t like his father had a day job or anything. Lucius simply sat in his study, fielding various correspondence all day. Normally it was requests for advice from the Ministry of Magic, but sometimes the letters were marked with addresses all the way from places like Romania. His father would be particularly careful with those ones, burning them before Draco could take a more thorough peak at them.

Draco had usually been relegated to sitting outside in the hall with a book, listening to his father’s pacing or the scratch of his quill through the door. Some days his father had let him in, presumably because he took pity on his son the same way a person would take pity on a stray cat left outside in the rain. On those days, Draco would try his best to be absolutely silent, wincing every time he accidentally crinkled a page of the book he was reading on the leather couch in the corner of the room, afraid his father would kick him out.

Eventually, he had stopped sitting outside in the hall, tired of waiting to be let in.

Surveying the room now, he could see not much had changed. The same thick, ornately threaded rug with its creeping vine design still lay spread across the floor, and the same imposing desk, made of wood so dark it almost appeared black, stood above it all at the front of the room. And there, in the corner, sat the same leather couch he had attempted to build a silent relationship on with his father.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Draco?” his father asked, pulling him out of his thoughts again.

His intended “No, father” got lost somewhere in between his brain and his mouth. Instead, what popped out was, “Why is it such a good thing that I’m friends with Theodore Nott?”

Lucius, who had obviously expected his son to bow out, blinked bemusedly up at him from behind the desk. “I already told you, Draco. Our families have been connected for some time.”

“No, but why? Some of the other students at Hogwarts have said that his family isn’t-”

His father waved this away. “Don’t listen to what others have said. He comes from a good, pureblood family. That in itself should explain my interest in you two being friends.”

“Pansy and Blaise are both purebloods,” he said defensively, “and you didn’t seem nearly as interested in them.” Meanwhile, he was mentally kicking himself for not leaving when he had the chance. Who cared why his father was taking such an interest in a few of his friends over the others? He should just be glad that his father hadn’t forbidden him from continuing his friendship with Theo, which had been one of the fears he had held since his mother first started asking about his friends at Hogwarts, and be done with it.

Questions were usually not a good idea in Malfoy Manor on a good day.

His father seemed to ignore the tone Draco had just indelicately flung at him to think over his answer, pulling on one of the ends of the velvet black ribbon holding his mane of white-blonde hair back from his face so he could run his fingers through it.

Lucius leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily. “Among the pureblood families in our world, some are more,” he paused for a moment, searching for the right word, “trustworthy. They hold the interests of our kind to a higher regard than…others.”

“What does that mean?”

Lucius smiled at him benevolently, patience starting to run out with this line of questioning. “I’ll explain more when you’re older. But as of right now,” he said with a sigh, standing up and walking around the corner of his desk to clap a hand onto Draco’s thin shoulder, “you’re too young to understand.”

Draco, who wasn’t a complete fool, saw the out for what it was and bowed his head obediently, feeling like he hadn’t gotten the answer he wanted, just more questions. The door swung open soundlessly on its hinges as his father pulled it open, leading Draco out. Lucius patted him on the shoulder, firm, but awkward, and allowed him to take a few steps down the hall before he said, “And, Draco?”

Draco spun quickly around on his heel. “Yes, father?”

Lucius’s lips twisted up at the corners in a smile that held no warmth, “Do not take that tone with me again, do you understand?”

Draco quickly slipped a contrite expression onto his face as he bowed his head once again in obedience. “Of course, father. It won’t happen again.”

“Be sure it doesn’t,” his father said, then closed the door with a snap.

Draco was sorry to acknowledge that he wasn’t an ideal seat mate the next day on the Hogwarts Express. He listened with only half an ear to what Theo was saying about his Christmas and his and his grandparent’s New Year’s celebrations. He was too caught up in trying to decipher what his father had said and how that applied to the little he knew about Theo’s family, and the other pureblood families in general, which he had never given much thought to before since there had never really been a need too. The Malfoy name, in his mind, was the only pureblood name worth caring about.

He was abruptly pulled out of his thoughts, which had progressively been going around and around in even tighter circles by Theo swatting his arm. “Ow, what was that for?” he cried, rubbing the barely sore spot.

“I just asked you no less than three times how your break was,” Theo said indignantly. “I’ve been going on for nearly an hour, did you hear anything I said at all?”

Draco huffed, “Of course I did! How could you even say something like that?” Theo crossed his arms and glared at him, blue eyes turning stormy with annoyance.

“Maybe you’re right,” Draco conceded. “But I promise my distraction has nothing to do with you.”

“Obviously.”

“Okay, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I swear to god, if you’re already thinking about Potter, I’m going to pitch myself off this train.”

“What? Why would I – I’m not thinking about Potter!” Draco cried as Theo threw his hands in the air, already expecting the worst. “My thoughts aren’t always Potter centered, you know. I have thoughts about a lot of other things.”

Theo rolled his eyes with a disbelieving snort, “Right.”

“For your information,” Draco snapped, “I was thinking about something my father said yesterday.”

Theo unconvinced, slumped into the cushions with stubbornly crossed arms and fixed his gaze on the world flashing by out the train window.

“Well, actually, we were talking about you, or rather, your family.”

Theo’s eyes darted away from the window as he sat up straight in his seat. “What about my family?” he asked quietly, drawing his legs up in front of him in a protective wall.

Draco was thrown slightly by his shift in mood and said hurriedly, “It wasn’t anything bad, I promise! My father actually seemed excited that I was friends with you, which was weird for him. Usually he’s not excited by much. He said all this stuff about how you come from a good family, better than some other purebloods he knows apparently.”

The look in Theo’s eyes had once again become skeptical and hard as they met Draco’s. “He really said that?”

“Yeah, come on, I wouldn’t lie to you.” Theo glared at him. “Okay, I wouldn’t lie to you about this.”

Theo shrugged and looked away again, out the window at the rolling hills flashing by. “It’s just that most of the time people don’t have a lot of good things to say about my family since my dad did what he did.”

It was quiet in the compartment for a moment, Theo’s eyes bouncing from the window, to Draco, to anything else in the small compartment, and back to the window. Draco was tempted to grab his face and make Theo look him in the eye as he asked in possibly the gentlest voice he’d ever spoken in, “What did your dad do?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the stories already.”

“Actually, I haven’t. And even if I had,” Draco said, seeing Theo’s whole body immediately tense up, “I would still want to hear your side of it.”

Theo sighed, heavily but looked Draco in the eye nonetheless. “Well, I’m pretty sure that Nan hasn’t told me the whole story-”

“Sounds familiar,” Draco grumbled to himself.

“-but the way she tells it, my dad and my uncle got caught up with some bad people, the same bad people that your father was involved with, and when my uncle tried to leave, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ordered my dad to kill him, and he did.” Theo was coiled tight like a spring, obviously waiting for an inevitable rejection, but Draco just waved him on to continue. “She told me that when the aurors finally caught up with him after You-Know-Who disappeared that he didn’t…play dumb like your dad did, even though your dad was the reason he and my uncle joined in the first place. He didn’t try to ‘weasel his way out of it’, she said. He’s been in Azkaban ever since.”

Draco shivered at the mention of the wizard prison. Historically, it was not a place that was painted in a pleasant light. Theo nodded in abrupt agreement with Draco’s reaction. “Yeah, I’ve been there. Once. On my tenth birthday. My Nan got a special concession from the Ministry to take me to see him, my dad. Everything she’d told me up until that point didn’t fit with what I remembered about him from when I was a baby, y’know? Like, I didn’t have a lot of memories of him, but the ones I did have weren’t bad. I just wanted to make up my own mind about him.” Theo was still curled into himself protectively at this point and Draco couldn’t resist the need to comfort him, even if he didn’t really know how too.

He moved across to sit beside him on the bench seat and they both watched the outside world flash by through the window. “Does that make me a bad person?” Theo mumbled.

“What?”

“That I wanted to see him. Maybe get to know him,” Theo said, his voice faint. “Am I a bad person for wanting those things?”

“I don’t think so,” Draco said mildly after a minute of consideration. “I think it makes you a normal kid who just wanted to know his father.”

Theo smiled gratefully at him and Draco felt his ears get a bit warm at the sight. He was reminded, somehow, of when he’d first seen Theo’s house when he was younger. How warm and loved it had looked. He wondered, briefly, if that had been another reason he hadn’t wanted to share Theo with his parents. Theo was easy smiles and sunshine and soft edges. Draco and his family were decidedly not those things.

He didn’t want that to spread like a stain onto Theo. He wanted them kept separate.

After a while, Theo forcefully disentangled himself as if it were a Herculean feat. He relaxed down into the cushions under him again and flung his arms out to the side, refusing the need to cross them. Draco noted how close their pinkies were to touching. “I still have nightmares about it,” Theo murmured, once again looking out the window.

“About what?”

“The Dementors. Have you ever seen one up? Up close?”

Draco shook his head, watching as Theo’s face screwed up as if he were trying very hard not to think about something, and failing miserably.

“Good, I hope you never do. They’re the stuff of nightmares. They suck the life out of everything around them, including people. Especially people.”

Draco suppressed a chill that tried to spider walk down his spine and cleared his throat, “So what happened? With your dad?”

Theo shrugged. “We never got to him. Where they keep him, with the other Death Eaters that were sent to Azkaban, it was so heavily infested with Dementors that we couldn’t get through. It was like they were…guarding them. Jealously. Like they thought we were going to try to take him away.”

“What’s a Death Eater?”

“It’s what You-Know-Who’s followers called themselves.” Theo’s eyes flashed to him suddenly from the window, “Did your dad really not tell you anything about what happened ten years ago?”

“No,” Draco said, fidgeting uncomfortably now that Theo had turned the tables on him. “We don’t really talk…much. About anything.”

“Oh.”

The two boys were silent for a moment, neither one looking at the other as they both thought of the weight of their wretched family histories, both known and unknown, that rested on their shoulders.

“Well, maybe what your dad said was true, maybe he really was under You-Know-Who’s control. What does my Nan know, really? It’s not like they were bosom buddies,” Theo said hastily, a nervous laugh escaping his lips.

“Yes, of course,” Draco said automatically, eager to leave the subject behind. His father had always been something of an unknown to him, but this? Sure, there had been some less than clandestine conversations in their home about the Dark Lord now that Draco thought about it, but that had just been a normal day around the Manor. He hadn’t known to be suspicious of any of what his father said or did when he didn’t think Draco was listening because it had all just been labeled as “grown-up talk” that he would “understand when he was older”.

And if what Theo said about Lucius’s past had any truth to it, then he may not want to understand. Ever. Because that meant his father had some skeletons in his closet that should remain buried.

“Come on,” Theo said, bumping Draco’s shoulder with his own. “Tell me about your holiday. I bet you got better stuff than me for Christmas.”

So, Draco did. He spent the rest of the train ride to Hogwarts telling Theo all about his Christmas, embellishing a little to make it more warm and cheerful than it was. Draco moved on to bemoaning his boredom after the New Year had come to pass through the entirety of the carriage ride up to the castle, the carriage pulled by some invisible force up the dirt path that cut through the forest. Theo seemed content to listen to him talk, interjecting at the right time with his own thoughts and complaints, which Draco appreciated greatly. It was a return to the normalcy and companionship that he had been craving since he had gotten off the Hogwarts Express all those weeks ago before Christmas.

It wasn’t until they walked through the doors of the Great Hall that Draco was forcefully reminded of the possible implications of his father’s past with the presence of the Boy Who Lived himself. Draco wanted to hex Potter off the face of the planet for it. But after sharing a brief glare between them, Potter went back to talking to his Weasel and Granger and Draco let Theo pull him in the direction of the Slytherin table on the opposite side of the room.

He diligently pretended not to hear Theo’s huff of annoyance.

Once they reached the Slytherin table, they were greeted by none other than Pansy, who greeted them with a withering look. “Where the hell have you two been? It’s been just me and Daphne alone for days.”

“Well, aren’t you just in a delightful mood, Miss Parkinson,” Draco said cheerfully, sitting beside Theo across from her. “What happened? Daphne’s company not up to snuff?”

“Have you two ever been alone with Daphne Greengrass for an extended period of time?” she asked the two boys with a dark look.

“No,” they said as one, noses wrinkling with distaste.

“Then you don’t get to judge me for wanting to glue her lips together. She never stops talking.”

“Why didn’t you try putting her in a Full-Body Bind?” Draco asked airily, starting to pile food on his plate. “You shouldn’t have a problem with her talking after that.”

“A what?”

“You know just,” Draco said as he pulled his wand out and flicked it in Theo’s direction, “Petrificus Totalus!”

Pansy’s mouth dropped open as Theo’s fork fell to his plate with a clatter, his arms springing to his sides and legs snapping together. “How did you just – show me that right now.”

Draco smirked, reveling smugly for a moment in his abilities before he lazily performed the counter spell, releasing Theo’s range of movement. Theo fell forward, wheezing. He looked up at Draco from where he’d braced his hands on the table, glaring as a few of the students around them chuckled. “I’m going to murder you,” Theo snarled.

“Ah Theo, no you won’t. You love me too much!” Draco crowed, wrapping an arm around Theo’s waist and drawing him into his side, planting kisses all over the side of his face.

Theo feebly shoved him off, wiping his face off and muttering under his breath about “suffocate”, “pillow”, and “so easy”. But Draco saw that his cheeks were slightly tinged with pink, and knew that he would survive the night. Turning back to Pansy, he explained the mechanics of the curse and how she needed to flick her wand just right to bind her opponent. He laughed along with everyone else around them when Daphne came in a short while later and Pansy dropped her, stiff as a board, before she even saw it coming.

Draco was especially gratified when Theo snickered into his tart at the sight.

Later that night, when they were both settling into bed, the dormitory to themselves for the evening, Theo sat up suddenly and carefully crossed his legs. Draco popped open one eye to see Theo’s gaze flicking between him and his twisting fingers, obviously trying to find a way to say something.

“If this is where you wait for me to fall asleep so you can kill me, please make it quick. I still haven’t written up that paper for Binns and I would really rather die than do it.”

Theo scoffed, but kept fidgeting.

“O-kay,” Draco said, sitting up, “What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to say,” Theo started, mumbling, still staring down at his lap.

“To my face, Theo,” Draco said, but not unkindly.

Theo cleared his throat. “I just wanted to say that you can talk to me about, y’know. Dad stuff. If you want.”

“Oh.”

“Well, because our dads aren’t…the best. All the time. Or ever. So, I just wanted to let you know that I’m here. If you ever feel like you’re going to blow your top. Or whatever,” Theo rushed, his words petering out.

Draco felt one of the corners of his mouth curl, “Blow my top?”

“Merlin’s beard, I don’t know! Rant, yell, cry, break something, whatever,” Theo said, waving his hands about as if to encompass the range of his bombastic emotions. “I just wanted to say that I’ll listen.”

Draco laughed, soft, “Thanks, I think.”

“Cool.”

There was a minute of silence in which both boys rolled away from each other, facing opposite sides of the room. But Draco couldn’t stop the chortle that climbed out of his throat as he said, again, into the quiet, “Blow my top.”

“Shut up!” Theo cried, chucking one of his pillows at Draco, making Draco laugh harder.

< Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 >

#dm #book one

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