Mother and Son
The first thing she noticed was that he didn’t seem surprised — he’d had plenty of warning, after all.
Secondly, he looked like hell. She assumed he had looked well and healthy over his three years with Hermione, but in the last three months, he’d plummeted. He was tall, thin, unshaven. Eyes bruised from sorrow.
“Hello,” he said. He kicked off his shoes, then threw his coat and bag — and wand — on the couch and went to the kitchen to make tea. He used the Muggle kettle to heat the water, poured it over loose tea leaves, strained them. Added milk and sugar and stirred it slowly with a spoon.
Narcissa ached to make it for him, but she reminded herself: This is his world and I am simply in it.
He sat on the couch, not at the table with her. His head fell back and he stretched his long legs on the coffee table. He sipped his tea briefly.
Then he left it on the table and stood up. “I made up the guest bedroom for you,” he said. “Everything in the kitchen and bathroom is Muggle technology, but feel free to use magic if you want. There are no elves, as you can see. I’m going to bed.”
It was 6PM.
His door closed and Narcissa drank her tea at the table as his cup stood untouched by the couch.
She magically washed and dried both cups and put them away. Then she sat on the couch and read his books until it was time to sleep. Bedded down in the guest bedroom, she wondered how a distance so short could feel so impossibly far.
***
Narcissa had come to stay as long as was needed, but Draco barely spoke to her.
He did all the shopping and kept the Muggle cooling box stocked. Over the week, she taught herself to use everything in the kitchen. It wasn’t so hard. By Friday, she made tea in the morning, using his kettle and other tools. The routine of it soothed her more than simple conjuration. She hoped to begin making it for him, but by the time she woke up, he was usually gone.
They quietly used the bathroom around each other, never interrupting. For meals, he ate small things from the kitchen, meals so small she flinched — mostly bread and cheese with a glass of wine, sometimes with a piece of fruit — but told her to buy or conjure or cook whatever she wanted.
During the day, he went to work at the alchemical laboratory, and when he came home, he went to bed.
She once peered in his bedroom after he’d gone to bed at his usual time, opening the door as softly as she could. His blanket was kicked off and he was in the fetal position. Knees to his chest, looking more like a man surviving a shelling than a man at rest. Like someone clinging reluctantly to life.
His glasses were folded on his nightstand and he looked very young — not much older than a teenager, though he had recently turned 25. He was shivering, even though it was summertime.
The cuddly purple toy was squashed under his elbow.
Narcissa went quietly in and covered him with the blanket. Tucked the toy in the crook of his arm and smoothed his hair. She sat beside him for a long time, speaking to him softly, but he never stirred or woke up.
***
They continued like this for one month. No words exchanged except the most basic ones. No progress, no regress. Quiet coexistence in the house, staying out of each other’s way. She read his books, he kept to his bedroom. And every day while he was gone, she looked again at the photos on his desk.
And then she had her opening. One night, he came home from work barely able to stand. Narcissa Malfoy's son was drunk, and not in a charming way. He said goodnight and then she heard him fall on his bed fully dressed, not changing, not even removing his jacket.
He'd even forgotten to remove his shoes.
She shuddered, but knew that he had to be the one to ask for help.
She obeyed his silence. All she could do now was obey. Then, later in the night, she heard him crying, calling for her. She was up in an instant, tying on her robe and going to him as she had during restless childhood nights, and she found him delirious and unraveled and speaking no sense.
“It hurts,” he rasped, “it’s hurting me.” He wasn’t feverish, he wasn’t chilled, but he was holding his chest and breathing shallowly, trembling with distress. Narcissa knew what was hurting him.
“Help me,” he said softly.
She eased him out of his jacket and shoes, removed his tie and put it to the side. “What happened, Draco,” she said with the wisdom of a parent, trying to sense what she could coax out of him. “Did you see her? Did you see Hermione when you were out?”
“I saw her out with someone…I think it was a date.”
Narcissa, who talked to Hermione every day, knew that this was not true. But she listened anyway.
The next thing he said ripped her in half.
“Maman,” he muttered, relapsing into French though they hadn’t spoken it in years, “why did you say I wasn’t your son anymore.”
Narcissa covered her face.
“Why did you say I had to choose between you and her,” he said faintly. “I can’t choose.”
He shifted on the pillow. “She’s my life…without her, I can’t live. But without you, I wouldn’t be alive at all.”
He reached for her shaking hand and took it in his.
“Words matter. Words are magical, you always told me that…why did you hurt me like that? How could you ever say that to me?”
Choose her, and I am no longer your mother. The depth of the pain she had inflicted was fully upon her. But she also remembered the pain of that day, the insanity, the delusion that had overtaken her as she wrote the letter.
If he chooses her, I lose him. If he chooses her, the person I love the most in this universe will disappear.
But he was never going to disappear. In fact, he — both of them — had been asking her to come closer. That was when she broke everything.
There was no either/or. She should never have asked him to settle for either/or. It was only both/and. She knew this now.
“I was wrong,” she said simply. “I was terribly wrong, Draco. I wronged my son. I failed as a mother that day. Your mother failed you that day.”
His fingers curled around hers, but his breathing was still uneven.
She took a deep breath of her own, and then took a risk. Seating herself upright against the pillows, she drew him to her and settled his head on her shoulder. They had sat like this countless times throughout his childhood; it was the exact pose from the photograph of them reading Les Mis together.
With one hand she ruffled his hair, with another she rubbed his chest, pressing her palm firmly against it. “Breathe,” she said. “My child, please breathe.”
Then, unsure how much he was hearing or understanding, but pressing ahead anyway, she told him the story she had never shared until now; had barely spoken of to anyone, as it was considered so unseemly. But she was not in her world now. She was in his.
“It took me a very long time to have you, Draco,” she said, as he leaned on her shoulder. “Years. We tried for years, and I lost several pregnancies. You have several brothers and sisters who never lived a day in this world. We don’t speak of these things, although we should.”
She remembered them all. She had named them all, each for a star. Shame, horror, heartbreak and loss, in a cycle that never seemed to end. And Lucius’s complete lack of sympathy or tenderness or understanding. His command that she never speak of the losses to anyone, lest she bring shame on the family. Her gradual realization that while she might have done the right thing by her family and its expectations, she had not done the right thing by herself.
She had not married the right man. She had not married the man who should be the father of her children. When Draco had asked, from time to time, why he was an only child and whether he would have any brothers or sisters, she had simply said she only wanted one, that he was enough for her, he was everything she could ever want.
“Years went by,” she said, willing her voice not to crack, “and I kept losing children, and I wondered if I would ever meet you. I didn’t know who you would be, of course. But I knew that when I did meet you, I would give you everything I possibly could in this world.”
Draco slid down and resettled his head in her lap. He was breathing steadily now. She stroked his hair, his prickly cheek, his adult jaw. My child has stubble. It was so strange, would never stop being strange.
“Until the day you were born,” she said, “I lived in fear of losing you. Not for myself — I had gone through too many losses by that time. Not for appearances — people already thought I was a barren woman who should hide her face.”
She choked and went on. “I simply lived in fear that all the love I was saving up for you would never find you. That I would never have a chance to be your mother. Your friend. That you, not even born yet, would never know how much I already loved you.”
The day he was born, with a full head of hair as light as cornsilk, he had opened eyes that were already wide, bright and skeptical, as though wishing the world to prove itself to him. She'd felt taken aback by the presence and point of view in the baby’s eyes. It didn’t feel quite…babyish. But she was already in love with her scowling little man.
Two names had been considered: Scorpius and Leo. But when she held him, another name called to her. A scorpion was too small, and a lion was too generic, somehow, for this intense little person. He reminded her of a dragon, full of hidden fire. And so she named him for one, holding her rare ground against Lucius, who didn’t like the name.
“You were a quiet baby,” she said, “And I decided early on that I would be the one to raise you. Your father opposed it, saying it was a job for elves, that a mother and son shouldn’t be so attached. Maybe it was a mistake, but I knew that once you were here, I wouldn’t forgo a single minute of time with you, while I had it to spend.”
Against the norms of Malfoy women, and to Lucius’s disgust, she’d fed her child herself, carried him herself, pushed him in his pram. She’d bathed his small body, changed him, dressed him, soothed him at night. Just like tonight.
“I remember the day you walked for the first time,” she said. It had been for her alone, in the rose garden. “Your hair used to be curly, little white and gold curls. It became straighter as you grew older.” She smiled. “You used to sing all the time, in a little, out of tune voice. And you had an invented language that you taught me.”
She’d taken on his entire primary education as her personal responsibility, no governess. Every moment with him was so critical. A moment to teach, a moment to ask him to grow with her. That was how the long evenings of reading began — sometimes in French, sometimes in English. And though Lucius despised it, she often read Draco Muggle literature — including Proust for two years, 5 pages a day, every night. (Proust never did find the Lost Time Turners). And Les Mis, though she herself did not know why she chose it; the poverty and extreme misfortune in the book had felt alien to her at the time. She tried to remember if Draco had chosen it because he liked the child on the cover of the book.
He understood a lot for a child. Rather than choose books at his age level, she simply read what was on the page and let him stop her when he didn’t understand. Sometimes a single page took an hour. His questions were sensitive and heartrending, she remembered. His endless concerns about Fantine and Gavroche, his care for Jean Valjean and for lives pummeled by forces greater than their own. She knew a little about that now. She remembered the battle she fought as she read it: she did not want her son to be a poor man, but he had questions about the poor, about what made people poor, about what made people unfortunate.
She still did not know how to answer them all.
“There was a day you became lost,” she said. “While we traveled abroad. I lost track of you in Berlin for a day. Draco, I could not breathe until I had you back.”
When had it gone wrong? Had it gone wrong because of Lucius? The fights between father and son had been horrific to watch. Lucius never hit Draco, but he hit him in every other way a child could be hit. The son developed the verbal arsenal to fight back. And then there were the lost and bitter years…the Dark Lord, the misguided alliances, the mistakes. So many terrible mistakes she had turned a blind eye to, only wanting to protect her son.
So much led up to the day she sent Draco the fateful letter. Where had her resistance to his relationship come from? Times were changing. Hermione was widely known, respected. There is no Hermione without heroine, it’s literally in her name was a common joke at the time.
It had just seemed black and white to her: if he fell in love with a Muggleborn, it would take him into a world where Narcissa could not follow him. He would fly away from her forever.
Yet here she was, his head in her lap.
Her heart told her he needed to hear more. Not just about how much she loved him as a child. He needed to hear that he was embraced as an adult man, as his own person.
“I see now why Hermione is your favorite person,” she said. “For what I said, I will apologize to you for the rest of my life, if I must. All I can say is that after nearly losing you so many times, I gave way to fear.”
He shifted in her lap, breathing quietly. She could tell he was listening.
“When you become a father,” she said slowly, “you will understand that every moment of raising a child involves a grueling discipline of letting go. But part of raising my boy has also been watching him return to me as a man. A man who is constantly learning new things. Who is constantly going into a world larger than mine. Who loves in a larger world than mine.”
She wiped her tears. “That is the way it was always going to be. I should have encouraged your movement into that world. Instead, I equated it with you leaving me behind, with my never seeing you again. Instead I wounded you, I hurt my child, in a way I'm not sure I can ever forgive myself for.”
She felt him shaking in her lap, and she calmed him again, rubbing his chest and pressing her palm into it gently.
“Nothing matters to me except your happiness,” she said. “And my wise boy, you know that what makes us happy in this life is not always what is good for us. But in this case, what makes you happy is also the best possible thing — the best possible person — who could happen to you. And I will do anything I can to bring her back to you.”
Then she said what she had come to say all along.
“As much as you are a son to me, she will be my daughter,” said Narcissa Malfoy. “The daughter I never had. Everything I have is yours, which means everything I have is hers. I am her mother now, too.”
***
The next morning, Hermione came over. Draco was asleep, still in all of his clothes. Narcissa had drawn the blanket over him, and Crookshanks had sat on the edge as a kind of feline paperweight, to make sure he didn’t kick it off.
When she opened the door, something in Narcissa that had felt very old, very stiff, very immovable, melted away. The older woman cried and opened her arms to Hermione, and the younger woman crushed her face into Narcissa’s shoulder. They stayed that way for a long time. Then Narcissa made Hermione a cup of tea and Hermione took it quietly into the bedroom and closed the door.
***
Draco had been dreaming about his face nestled happily between Hermione's legs, so he was surprised, and a little annoyed, to open his eyes and find her face right in front of him.
“Good morning,” she said. She was wearing a St. Mungo’s sweatshirt and her hair was in a messy bun.
He felt absolutely terrible physically, but something else inside him felt back in place.
“You’re still dressed,” she said.
The night came back to him. His mother…her words. She had spoken to him for hours. And like the sun melting ice, or the wind working on stone, something had shifted inside him.
Something good had happened vis-a-vis his mother, but he was uncertain regarding the woman in front of him.
“Weren’t you on a date last night?”
She looked at him strangely, then laughed. “No, that was…”
Then she smiled. “I’ll tell you later.”
He sat up, scratching his head. “Mother and I reconciled,” he said slowly.
Hermione nodded.
“She said she accepts you. That you would be like a daughter to her. That — ” Draco glared — ”she would love you as much as she loves me.”
Hermione smiled and touched his nose.
“I’m still her son, you know,” Draco felt obliged to remind her, pouting. “She loves me the most.”
“Of course she does,” said Hermione, climbing into the bed. She tugged his shirt collar open and nuzzled his neck.
“You smell like a raging hangover,” she said frankly. “Like a shoal of Plimpies has died in your mouth.”
He groaned. “Wait one minute,” he said, shuffling to the bathroom. She heard water running and, a few minutes later, he came out.
In front of her, he began to cast off his shirt, undershirt, trousers. “Turn around,” he said.
“Draco,” she said, “my tongue has literally been up your behind, right here in this bed, while you screamed that I was murdering you and that my mouth and I should be locked up in Azkaban. I’m not turning around.”
He turned bright red. Then he grinned slyly. That was a good memory. He changed into Saturday morning pyjamas and lay down next to her again.
“All clean,” he said, sitting down and running his fingers idly along hers. “What do we do now?’
“Your mother is going to stay for a few weeks,” said Hermione, drawing Crookshanks to her as he padded into her arms. “I think you two need some time together. I think — I think it’s too soon for me to move back in. But if it’s all right, I’d like to start bringing my things back. And I’ll sleep over a few nights a week.”
Any time. All the time. Until the end of time. Gods.
“Yes, anything,” he said. “And Hermione, I’ll go get treatment. With you. With my mother. By myself. Whatever it takes.”
He wondered if Hermione would agree to defile him while his mother was staying with him. Silencing Charms existed for a reason.
"Draco," she grinned, "you said that out loud."
"No I didn't," he glared. "The cat did."
She smacked him. “About treatment,” she continued. “That’s who I was with last night. That was my friend Ronan. He’s a Mind Healer. We were out for dinner to talk about what treatment might look like. For all of us.”
He sighed, overwhelmed with relief and feeling a bit idiotic. But then, everything about this had been a tale told by idiots.
“Draco,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “I was wrong to put that choice on you in the way I did. You do need to get treatment and you do need to heal. But I shouldn’t have forced your hand. I shouldn’t have framed it the way I did, as though I was punishing you. I was wrong.”
It was a happy occasion when she admitted she was wrong. And now she and his mother had done it within 24 hours of each other. He was a blessed man, and he savored it.
And then he said what he needed to say: “I was wrong, too.”
And then he whispered all the ways he’d been wrong into her neck, into her hair, and finally, into her mouth.
She savored it too.
***
A year later, they were married. Theo was the best man (of course) and Ronan her mate of honor. Harry and Ginny’s toddler Albus scattered petals, toppling over in the aisle and wailing before Draco himself ran down, picked him up, and tucked him firmly under his arm like a rogue Bludger. Harry offered to take him, but Draco shook his head; Albus was contented. Crookshanks perched in a chair of honor by the altar.
After the night Narcissa apologized to her son, things had moved fast. Hermione moved back in a month later, not three months as she had planned, and Narcissa rented her own flat in London. She invited the elves to come with her, but they didn’t like working with electricity, and they refused. So she reached out to her sister Andromeda. The sisters now lived together half the year in Muggle London, and grew to very much like their new iPhones and a game that involved launching enraged birds through the air.
Narcissa's relationship with Hermione made Draco blissfully jealous. He saw what she meant about wanting a daughter. They went out together for hours, talked and laughed for hours — and Draco suspected, correctly, that a large portion of what they laughed about was him.
They were like twins, infuriating and indispensable in the same ways, which made sense. And when they began to gang up on him, teasing him in the same ways, he knew he was a lost man. But no part of him wanted to be found. And both Hermione and Narcissa knew that what they had won back was precious, and disciplined themselves to back off when they were about to go too far.
Whenever Narcissa greeted or left them she dispensed three hugs: one for Hermione, one for him (his was longer, because she was his mother) and then one for them both.
They came to her in May to tell her they were getting married, and to ask if she would walk them both down the aisle: Draco on her left, Hermione on her right. She was the only parent either of them had left, and so she did. She had her wedding ring resized for Hermione, and offered her wedding gown, but Hermione gratefully declined, choosing to be married in a green cocktail dress instead. Narcissa accepted it, since she had resolved that she would physically assault or hex anybody or anything that prevented this wondrous woman from marrying her son.
Narcissa also officiated. It had been very simple to arrange. She read a combination of ancient wizarding marriage rites and modern poetry, both as the officiant and in her capacity as the mother of the groom. She read verses about being wrong, admitting error, growing up, and accepting the new. She spoke about finally having a daughter — and for the first time, she spoke publicly about the children she had lost.
Then the newlyweds kissed and drew her into a hug with them. Including Albus, who had gone to sleep in Draco’s arms. Once Draco gave him back, he and Hermione disappeared for a few minutes and came back in glowing disarray, the green cocktail dress looking slightly worse for wear.
Theo gave a beautiful toast in which he told the story of his role in their reunion. When he and Draco danced together later, Draco thanked him for being a pest, and marveled at how many people had moved mountains for his happiness.
And the cake was an enchanted map of Victor Hugo's Paris.
Later on the dance floor, Draco offered Narcissa his hand. They swayed together slowly across the floor, her head on his shoulder, his hand loose and trustful on her lower back.
"So when will you make me a — " she asked by reflex, then stopped. No demands, not anymore.
He smiled. "In a few years. We want to get ourselves right first."
She nodded. Times had changed. People took their time.
There was time.
“It’s a beautiful wedding,” she said. “Different from what I grew up with. But perfect.”
“It’s perfect because you’re here,” he said.
She squeezed him tighter. He squeezed back.
“Thank you, Mother,” he murmured. “For everything.”
“Thank you, chouchou,” she murmured back.