Chapter 4
The next morning, Draco was determined to find answers.
He called in sick to work, and made arrangements to visit his parents.
His mother greeted him in the floo parlour with a soft smile.
“Draco, darling. How nice of you to visit. We thought you’d forgotten about us.”
He smiled weakly back at her.
“Sorry mother. Work’s been busy.”
“Of course,” she said though the light in her eyes dimmed with disapproval.
Draco’s parents never understood why he left home, why he wanted to work, why he would never marry a pureblooded witch and continue the Malfoy line.
But they lived with it, and that was the most Draco could ask for.
He followed his mother through the hall into the sitting room, where a cup of tea sat waiting for him at a corner table.
He waited for his mother to sit before following suit.
She looked at him expectantly.
It was moments like these that broke Draco’s heart.
Though she looked put together, Narcissa Malfoy was a shell of her former self, fallen from grace, lost in her own deluded world.
She wasn’t ill, per se, or mad. But she looked happy and Draco just couldn’t fathom how she could put on this pretence after everything that had passed.
After he was acquitted and his father was sentenced to Azkaban, Draco left home. He begged his mother to join him, but she refused, saying she had a duty to the house and her husband.
That duty didn’t seem to extend to him, her only child.
So Draco left and never looked back, spending that first year with Pansy in Paris while she got her footing as a writer.
He spent that time taking his NEWTS by owl, and pursuing further studies in charms and transfiguration — what he’d hoped to do after Hogwarts if things had been different.
But few employers were keen to take him on as an apprentice and in the end it was his potions acumen that secured him his job.
So he took it, and in time, he even grew to enjoy the work, and the company of his colleagues.
He apologized to Granger, and his other classmates and McGonagall. He donated most of his inheritance to the right causes to help after the war, he found Martin, his kneazle.
He started going out more, figuring out who he was, dating, even going to muggle gay clubs.
Then Lucius got out for medical reasons five years into his life sentence and Draco’s world came crashing down on him again along with a lifetime of expectations and disappointments.
But the thing about disappointment is that it can go both ways.
It took years of therapy on and off for Draco to accept that he was disappointed in his parents. And that he was allowed to be.
He felt resentful that his mother stayed with his father over him despite the hell he’d put them through.
Angry at himself for his poor choices and angry at Dumbledore and Snape and every other adult in his life who didn’t notice and offer him a lifeline.
He felt sick realizing that other kids didn’t grow up fearing their parents, flinching at the sound of footsteps, or the crack of apparition. That it wasn’t normal for family dinners to be devoid of emotion and warmth. That he was ENVIOUS of the Weasleys.
And now, sitting here with his mother, who’d never acknowledged the hurt she’d caused him, or apologized for her part in it, or fought for him beyond keeping him alive to do his father’s bidding out of a misguided notion of motherly love…he just felt sad.
He’d long given up hope that he’d ever have a normal loving relationship with his parents. But they held on to that delusion well into his adulthood and continued to do everything in their power to make it seem real.
“How have you been, mother?” Draco asked, lifting his tea to his lips.
Narcissa smiled. “I’ve been well darling, Mimsy has been redoing the gardens. You might have noticed if you’d been by sooner. But I’m sure you’ve been busy, as you said.”
She looked at him expectantly but he refused to shrink in her gaze.
Pulling out his own perfected fake smile, Draco decided to get to the point.
“Yes, I have been busy at work, mother. Quite busy in fact. That’s partly why I’m here you see…I was hoping to take a look through the library, something for a new project I’ve just started.”
“I see,” Narcissa said lips puckering slightly in displeasure.
“Well I won’t keep you then. Lovely to see you dear.”
“Yes mother,” he said and stood up abruptly already mentally cataloguing the manor’s collection.
He spared a thought for Granger then completely unwillingly, feeling annoyed that she would probably be a useful person to consult about something like this.
But no, the second she found out it had something to do with Potter she would no doubt suspect Draco of wrongdoing.
This was something he’d have to do on his own.