Chapter Text
"If you want to tear my world apart,
Just say you've always wondered"
-"Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus" by Taylor Swift
The rain mocked in its relentless deluge. Thick, heavy drops fell steadily, and there was seemingly no seal on the sieve in the clouds.
The officiant at the front spoke of “beyond magic” and “no pain," while the crowd tittered about how it was “such a shame” and she was “so young.” But one wizard wasn’t speaking to anyone. As the mourners greeted him, they wore all black to honour the dead, but he couldn't understand why they didn’t adore her in life. They spoke to the wizard, but he didn’t hear them except in the way that a gramophone is muffled playing in another room- there are words, but they have no meaning.
Only the melody of grief was distinguishable in the sounds.
And all the while, the six-month-old in the wizard’s arms cried. He couldn’t make him stop.
He rocked the child.
Fed him.
Handed him to the au pair he had hired.
But the six-month-old couldn’t seem to cease his wailing. It appeared the infant knew more than he let on because the wizard suspected that the babe was distressed due to having to be raised by him alone.
Slowly, the crowd dwindled. The officiant disapparated with a loud crack, and silence began to hang over the graveyard. The cemetery hosted the wizard's family for hundreds of years: a legacy of brittle bones, bitter feelings, and bought salvation. He knew there would be food waiting for the guests in the manor's drawing room, along with spirits- at least of the kind one could imbibe, not talk to- and probably a lengthy discussion of the 'virtues of life' by his father. But the wizard couldn’t tear himself away from the raised ground before him.
The grounds grew silent except for the sound of the wind rustling through the trees as the infant stopped crying, almost as if magic had silenced him. The rain had ceased, but the sky was still a dreary grey, the clouds pregnant with more precipitation. This was not an uncommon sight in the English countryside, but it made this day seem even more unbearable.
“I’ve never liked the sound of crying babies.”
The wizard winced, the familiarity of the voice making his skin crawl and his heart pound simultaneously. That voice would have made him think of potions class or sneaking out of the common room at one point in his life. At another point, it would have reminded him of stolen moments that were never to be spoken of in polite company. Now the voice made the wizard cling harder to the small child in his arms, desperately hoping that the darkness marking the man wasn’t transferable to the tiny human he was forced to care for.
“Good thing you don’t have one.”
The man chuckled softly and stepped forward. He wandlessly conjured a single black rose out of thin air and placed it on the headstone before him. It was simple compared to the ornate flower arrangements overflowing on the burial site- provided by politicians, businessmen, and more sycophants than the wizard could count. Still, the rose was also more striking in its elegance against the bone-white marble of the headstone than any of the excessive displays of supposed condolence.
The man stepped back, his grey-blue eyes flashing toward the babe, who stared at him curiously from the wizard’s arms. The wizard held the child closer, running his hand to the back of the six-month-old’s white-blonde hair and pressing the tiny face against his chest, as if shielding him would stop the inevitable travesties that would occur.
“He looks like the perfect combination of you and her.”
The wizard frowned. He knew the man had called his wife “homely.” The man had said the wizard was “too pretty” for a woman like her.
So the wizard opted not to speak—just stared at the tombstone, watching the black rose sit atop it, almost seeming to mock the day in its perfection.
“I’ll be gone a while, and I hope it is enough time to allow you to mourn.”
The wizard nodded almost imperceptibly while the child blinked up, observing the conversation, layered with unspoken demands, unyielding stubbornness, and unexpressed feelings.
“What is the boy’s name again?”
The wizard wanted to yell at this man. A man who was there at his son’s birth.
To remind him that his grey-blue eyes witnessed in St. Mungo’s when the healers came out with joy to greet the men in the waiting room, the wizard’s school friends and family celebrating with him after a fraught and difficult delivery that couldn't be handled in Wiltshire.
To admonish the man who had held the small boy in his hands with those long fingers and avoided touching a single centimetre of skin on the newborn- as if he could catch normality from the brush of his fingers.
To question the man- who had been the wizard’s equal at one point- about why he had avoided his son's first cries, surreptitiously covering his ears to block the noise.
To recognise the uneasy feeling he retained when the inner circle had all lit cigars and had brandy, the man's full pink lips sipping pressed against his glass as if he knew some cosmic joke, while the babe lay obliviously in his mother’s arms.
To criticise that the man had turned his deceptively regal nose up at the whole scene.
The wizard wanted to scream at the man that his presence had disturbed and angered him so much at his son’s birth that he had no joy that day.
Instead, the wizard simply mumbled, “Lucius.”
The man raised one dark eyebrow. “Lucius. That means light.” Without warning, he turned away, his robes swishing around him, and the man walked back into the shadows from where he came. In his retreat, the man’s footsteps were light on the wet ground, like a serpent slithering away in the grass, already hunting its next prey.
The wizard, running a hand through his blonde hair, looked at the headstone one last time before walking off. And the words etched into the marble finally sank in.
Juliette Madeline Beauchamps Malfoy.
Mother. Wife.
1 April 1935- 8 June 1955
Abraxas Malfoy regarded the boy in his arms and said, “It is just you and me now, Lucius.” The rain started again, water clinging to his face that he didn’t bother to wipe away. All the while, the black rose was unaffected by the thick drops cascading from the sky.
Abraxas returned to the manor, a solitary figure with a baby in his arms.
No light seemed to shine on the father and son or the graveyard they left behind.