𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄

Part 5

1.

Granger is the secret keeper and Weasley is the godfather. Draco doesn’t know which is worse.

Even after six months, Potter still receives bunches of helium balloons and hatemail at his office. Who is she?!? some of the letters read. I love you, Harry Potter! others say.

Draco is neither female nor does he love Harry Potter, and yet all of these women and girls and sometimes the occasional boy demand to know about that secret wife and mother of his child that The Daily Prophet claims Potter has stashed away in Muggle suburbia. He laughs at the thought, but he collects all the letters in a great big brown box in the spare and reads them over when he’s bored.

Since Christmas day, not a word has been said between Potter and himself about that kiss. Those kisses, he reminds himself. They live parallel lives, in the same home, eating the same food, doing the same things with the baby, but they never come together. This is not the life his parents had, his first family. His mother and father would kiss and touch and dance and speak of things beyond the mundane- weather, Quidditch scores, Potter’s lack of washing his clothes and leaving great piles of sweaty, muddy robes all over the house.

Perhaps if he’d married Pansy he would have had a life that he craves deep-down inside. She fawned over him, she kissed him, petted him, touched his hair, her hands were constantly on his body in school. He’d shrugged it off them, but he doesn’t think he’d mind having an arm around his waist. Sometimes when Potter sits in front of the talking box in the evening, Draco has the urge to stretch his arm out behind Potter, but he never, ever dares too.

He doesn’t know what he wants anymore. He finds his eyes lingering on Potter when he steps out of the shower in the mornings, wearing nothing but a low-slung towel. He finds himself waiting impatiently in the evenings for Potter to come home with food, so he can tell Potter just what Pyrrha did today (since he never does anything himself). He wants to make Potter laugh at his jokes and smile at him, and not just a half-arsed glance that he gets once in a while.

He hasn’t left Potter’s house. He wants to know what Potter wants: surely he can’t stay here until Pyrrha goes off to school, because she will, Draco knows it. There hasn’t been a squib in the family since his Great-Great Uncle Flavius and no one ever spoke of him because he lived locked up in the attic for a good forty years.

He wants attention. He stares into the stacks of letters and note cards in the box, and he contemplates going to The Daily Prophet with his story. However, he sincerely doubts they would believe him unless he showed them and there is absolutely no bloody way he is showing anyone what the potion did to him down there, not even Potter.

2.

It is his twenty-first birthday tomorrow. He wonders if Potter even knows. Every wizard knows Potter’s birthday and he has since he was small, but he doesn’t think anyone would really care when Draco Malfoy’s birthday is, firstly, because his friends have disowned him and his family is dead and secondly, because he is supposedly to be an MIA Former Death Eater, potentially and probably armed and dangerous.

He doesn’t ever dissuade Potter from thinking he was a Death Eater because Potter never asks him about that and he doesn’t want to tell Potter that he was always a coward, he couldn’t kill Dumbledore, he couldn’t kill Muggles, he was weak and pathetic and that is what got his family killed. The guilt eats him up inside, even years later after he’s had time to think on it long and hard.

When he sees his daughter smile at him, with her gummy grin and her bright eyes, he reckons it can’t have all been wrong.

She has fine, fair hair now. The downy black hair fell out months ago and he’d nearly panicked, considering to hand himself over to the Ministry if it meant she could see a Healer at St. Mungo’s to make sure she hadn’t caught some Muggle disease. But Weasley- damn him!- had told Potter that several of his brothers were worn with black hair until it fell out in turn.