Summer's a bitch
Draco notices things.
It’s what he does.
He notices that the round table knights and friends who reside in the Emrys household all would have been close to King Arthur, and probably Merlin himself. He notices that neither Merlin nor King Arthur are pictured with them. He notices that Arthur Penn (and what a cover name, honestly) and ‘Myrridian Emrys’ all consider them family, seemingly forgetting that they’re supposed to have physical guardians and claiming them to be ‘away a lot’.
Is it horrifying that THE Merlin and King Arthur, or at the very least their descendants, are attending high school with him as students? Yes. Is it at all surprising? No. Whenever someone swears to Merlin, ‘Em’ jerks around like he’s heard his name. Between the wandless magic, the infinite maturity and wisdom, the interference with the chamber and the philosopher’s stone, and the fact that Emrys directly translates to endless, it’s hardly a reach. And again, Arthur Penn.
Draco notices other things, too. He notices that pillows on couches go quietly missing and Harry seems nervous whenever anyone frowns at the pillowless couch. Draco’s seen Dobby do the same thing when he had to sleep on the open floor to attend them- he piled them around himself because he was used to enclosed space (i.e. the attic crawl space Draco’s father gave him to nest in) and couldn’t sleep with all that room. Coupled with the way Harry’s bulked up almost to Arthur’s size since he started taking those potions in the morning when it looked like he was going to be one of those people who never looked a healthy weight in all their life, Draco’s put together a picture of his past he doesn’t like. Harry still startles slightly at being addressed by his name, like he doesn’t recognise it. He immediately checks the exits and puts himself in position to dash out whenever anyone raises their voice, eyes wide and locked on whoever it is, watching for signs of escalation. He automatically gravitates toward the least obtrusive space he can take up in any given room, making sure he can see the most and is seen the least. It’s in the little things- and Draco specialises in the little things.
Draco notices the significant changes that slam into his… friends, over the summer. Each of them goes through a massive growth spurt, Harry’s helped along by a newly discovered desire to join Arthur in all of his workouts. Draco watches the smiles that come to Harry’s face when his hard work pays off, when his progress becomes apparent and Harry becomes powerful in his own right. Draco sees it for what it is: an earning and claiming of ability that is entirely his by right. It’s not about the physical changes- Harry blooms with the realisation that he can do something if he wants to. It’s not a minor shift. It’s a catalyst. Harry starts to change in tiny, important ways without even realising them, and that’s what’s going to make him who he is.
Hermione changes perhaps the most of all of them- physically, that is. She’s not staying in the castle with them, but she charm-calls them once a day after Em writes her a letter to tell her how. While Harry’s beefing up and learning to take up the space he has every right to, and Ron’s getting taller (like that’s fair), and Arthur’s shooting up to the point where he rivals Em (whose slouch helps quite a bit), Hermione is growing out rather than up. It suits her. Her cheeks fill out so her plump lips don’t look so incongruent on her face. The volume of her hair finally seems to make visual sense. Any bashfulness she might have about her clothes no longer fitting is quickly stamped out by the barrage of compliments from the residents of the castle and the entire new wardrobe Em delightedly ships out to her the moment she admits it. He maybe goes a little bit overboard. Draco may or may not help a little- if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s dress, and Granger is in desperate need of his expertise.
Draco notices that when Dobby visits between trips around the world to places he never thought he’d see, after he’s given out his armfuls of souvenirs and waxed poetic about how pretty the pyramids are, and of course after the obligatory half an hour of stuttering and blushing that follows Hobby entering the room, Dobby gives Arthur some reverent glances that confirm Draco’s suspicion that he’s the one that freed the elf. Draco’s lips curl up imagining his father trying to figure that one out through his outrage, and he spares a moment to be glad he’s here for the summer.
That’s not the only thing that looks different from here. Every summer, like clockwork, he would make observations in his regular manner. And it is increasingly apparent to him, in this first summer away from home, that they never led anywhere. He notices this when he makes the same observations about himself and then waits for them to be negated.
And they aren’t.
For a while it stumps him- this inescapable feeling that someone should be offering him an explanation, in not so many words, for why he needn’t concern himself with such musings. Why cutting his hair just like he did every day was the right thing to do, even when no one else had to. Why he had to make sure to keep his voice low. Why his father performs those charms on him once a year, no exceptions. It’s all for his own good, right? His mother will assure him as much any moment now, when the questions start to subconsciously rise in him as they do each year. She will say it in such a way that makes him feel silly for asking, and he’ll remember that this is just how it is. Always has been.
But he is not home this summer. No one checks that he’s cut his hair every day. No one performs the charms. And when Draco starts to wonder about these things, no one tells him not to.
Draco notices, when his father sends him a letter, that it is a terse, thinly veiled way of checking if he has been cutting his hair. He’s never asked outright before. By the jerky way he prints his Ys, he and mother have been fighting. He sounds worried.
Draco, deeply perturbed, does some research. He feels he is on the cusp of something he doesn’t want to look over the edge of.
It is horrible when things start to make sense.
It’s absurd. Absurd, like Merlin and King Arthur going to Hogwarts.
Absurd doesn’t mean impossible.
In accordance with the little things that Draco notices, the evidence he ammasses, the research he reluctantly must acknowledge… he is forced to come to a conclusion.
Perhaps the worst part is, it’s not so unbelievable.
It makes sense.
Draco has a few very, very bad nights. Then, entirely unsure of himself, he goes to Arthur, because Em is too understanding to be anything but supportive whether Draco deserves it or not. Draco cannot deal with anything so unfamiliar as unconditional support right now. Not with this.
Arthur arches an eyebrow at him over his book, taking the offered potion vial that Draco hasn’t taken since he reached his conclusion.
“You want to know what’s in it? Who prescribed it to you? They should’ve told you,” he starts. Then his eyes narrow. He hardly glances at the potion, putting it down and aside as he regards Draco curiously. “Why would you come to me for this, anyway? Em’s much better with potions than I am.”
Draco shakes his head to hide the fact that he’s shaking anyway. Swallowing feels like a Herculean challenge. No, maybe not Hercules- Sisyphus. Yes. Draco is feeling very Sisyphus right now.
“Because you’ve been alive long enough to know how to tell what’s in a potion, or you’d know how to find out. You’re King Arthur, you can figure it out. That’s not what I’m asking. I need to know what it does.”
Draco is keenly aware of how quickly his steadiness abandoned him through that little tirade. He’s not being concise or clear about his intentions, not addressing things in the right order or formulating his thoughts in a coherent fashion. He’s making a mess of things already, but he feels a mess. He is a mess, right now. He feels the failure all the more when Arthur frowns, potion forgotten, and comes in closer as if to catch him should he fall. Is he really so pathetic?
“Draco, what’s this about?”
“I’m a veela?” stumbles out of his tortured throat in an ugly blurt. “I think I’m a veela? My father makes me cut my hair and I think the charms are for- so that I- I think-”
Draco fights as Arthur steadies him, tries to get him to stop talking so he can breathe, because this is important, this needs to be addressed, he needs someone to hear it and fix it so he doesn’t have to deal with it anymore. He needs it gone now now now, he needs to just give it to Arthur and run away. Arthur’s an adult, a bloody timeless king, he can handle it and Draco can forget it ever happened. Please. He can’t take this anymore.
Much to Draco’s shame, he cannot get it out and breathe at once, and he’s helpless to the storm of emotion that whips around him like a blizzard, stinging his eyes and seizing his heart and hurting him. It just hurts.
Arthur waits the storm out with him. Draco only gives in when he sees Arthur put silencing charms on the room so this humiliating breakdown has no audience. There’s no way he can’t do that wordlessly, so he obviously says the spell for Draco’s sake. He really is that transparent, then. What a castle of lies Draco’s identity is built on. It’s his own stupid fault for believing his parents wouldn’t lie to him. It’s his own stupid fault he’s been reduced to a snivelling little child in the arms of the more experienced, who he dared to equate himself with. This is just the inevitable wake-up call.
Draco wishes he didn’t care why he was sad. He wishes he didn’t notice things. He wishes he grew up in a household like the Weasley’s, where it was safe to be stupid. In a moment of weakness remarkable in the concentrated collection of moments of weakness this shitshow is turning out to be, Draco even wishes he never found out. If he’d just not asked, he wouldn’t feel like this.
“This potion’s from your parents? They’ve been giving you these?” Arthur’s voice, strong as bedrock, asks. Draco manages to nod, thankful that at least someone’s getting somewhere while he’s having his pathetic little pity party.
“Okay,” Arthur says gently. Draco grasps onto it like an anchor. “Okay. We’ll figure it out, Draco.”
Draco already has. That’s the problem.
“Do you know how to undo it?” Draco asks an indeterminate amount of time later.
“It’s possible.”
“What’ll that… do, to me?”
Arthur sighs. “I don’t know. Let’s not rush into anything. You’ve stopped taking the potions?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Uhm… last week. Wednesday.”
“Okay. Noticed any effects? You’ve been in your room a lot, have you been sleeping?”
“‘M tired.”
“That’s probably an effect of going cold turkey. I’ll look into it. How long have you been on the potions?”
“As long as I can remember.”
“They didn’t tell you what it was for.”
“No.”
“Draco…” Arthur takes a deep breath, and Draco closes his eyes because he just knows what he’s going to say. “You know that… Veela genes are only passed on to the females of the species. There have been no recorded half-veela males.”
Draco takes a steadying breath and pointedly does not look Arthur in the eyes.
“My p- my father wouldn’t have wanted a girl to carry on the Malfoy name anyway, let alone a half-breed,” he utters distantly. “Can’t make a boy, fix the girl. It makes sense.”
“What about your mother?”
“I… I don’t know,” Draco admits. He turns lost eyes on Arthur. “I don’t know.”
Arthur folds him into a hug, and Draco only takes it because there’s no pity in it and he’s having trouble finding the motivation to do anything.
“We will figure it out, Draco. I’ve got you.”
“How?” the boy spits defensively. “You have experience finding out your parents have been playing god with your genetics to suit their tastes?”
“Um… close,” Arthur admits, which makes Draco curious enough to be distracted. Curious enough, even, to meet the man’s eyes and demand an explanation.
“My mother couldn’t conceive naturally. So my father turned to magic. But the price for one life is always another.”
“Each action has an equal and opposite reaction,” Draco recites mechanically.
“Mhm. Uther- the king, my father- he was more than willing to let some peasant die if it meant he got his heir. But it was my mother that died in exchange for my birth.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I’m not finished.”
Draco sits down to listen.
“My father knew the circumstances. He’d been forewarned this would happen, he would have recognised the price he paid for what it was. But he couldn’t accept it. He refused to be at fault for his wife’s death. For the sake of his own sanity, he blamed magic.”
“Magic? What, just- all of it?”
“Mhm.”
“You can’t blame magic.”
“That’s what he did,” Arthur shrugs. “This was before the witch hunts, you understand, before the Statute of Secrecy. Muggles were as aware of the existence of magic as sorcerers. It was a part of life. The ultimate state of peace existed between magic and non-magical peoples before my father decided it killed my mother and outlawed it on pain of death.”
Draco goggles. He knew that, in theory, but hearing it from Arthur himself, just said like that…
“He executed people for using magic,” Draco remembers.
“He executed people for having magic. He executed people for knowing people who had magic. He probably executed people for saying the word ‘magic’ out loud. Women, children, mothers, sons, entire families. He culled people in the thousands. It was genocide.” Arthur sighs. “I didn’t find out about my mother until I was about twenty summers. When I did, I nearly killed him. Merlin stayed my sword.”
“Merlin?!”
Arthur nods solemnly. “He was not about to let me drive myself to madness as my sister did, even if it turned out I was born of the very thing my father had striven to purge from the earth with near unholy wrath. I’d been killing sorcerers all my life because he taught me magic was an unspeakable evil from the time I could speak. To find out it was all a lie, everything from my birth to my life and the things I fought for… it wasn’t hard to see what sent my sister into her insanity.” He shakes his head and spreads his hands to either side. “And what would it have accomplished?”
Draco’s eyes go distant as he mulls this over.
“What indeed.”
Draco still has to take some of his potions. He has to be safely weaned off them, and one life-altering discovery does not make up for thirteen years of unknowingly dosing oneself with steroids. It will take time. But Draco wakes up the next morning, and for the first time in his life, does not cut his hair.