An End And A Beginning

1: Your Soul Is A Chosen Landscape

It seemed somehow fitting that the autumnal leaves on the trees outside were starting to fall. As yet another year after the war crept towards it's close, Draco clutched the letter in his hand and watched the Owl swoop away into cold sunshine that made the light glisten on the dew-soaked cobwebs spun on the tall hedges in front of Malfoy Manor.

The letter was from the Governor of Azkaban saying his father's health was worrying them. The prison physician suspected heart failure and kidney failure. Now there were added complications, an infection in his leg, toxins not been cleared naturally by his failing kidneys and the inability for his heart to pump fluids around his body with enough strength. They were transferring Lucius to St Mungo's Hospital.

He supposed that the letter wasn't telling the whole truth regarding the severity of his father's failing health; that things were potentially far worse than to be supposed, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to contact Draco. As a result, Draco imagined that his father's end was nearing.

As he watched his mother already at work, preparing the gardens to the side of the Manor for winter, he sighed and re-tied his long hair back into a ponytail. It was long these days, like Lucius's, but purely because it was over four years since he'd seen a hairdresser. However, compared to his father, he wore it tied back... he always wore it tied back, invariably in a messy knotted ponytail.

Draco wasn't sure how he felt. There was a lot of ambiguous feelings towards his father, he was, after all... well... Draco's father. But, and it was a large 'but', his father was responsible for the many calamities that had befallen Draco and his mother since long before the Battle of Hogwarts, including the militant grooming into what he now saw as false and shallow beliefs, the order to become a Death-Eater and take the Dark Mark, the casual request to murder without thought or culpability... Then there was the war itself. And although Lucius was not responsible for starting the war, he certainly advocated all it stood for and never shied from the path leading to its culmination in Lucius's life imprisonment in Azkaban, Draco's and his mother's five-year house arrest, and the irretrievable fall from grace...

Draco had momentarily thought his father's absence would be a relief. However, even with Lucius behind bars, life since the war had shown his father's legacy was a heavy burden to carry in so many ways. There had been the destruction of the familial name, the loss of most of the Malfoy fortune, the total collapse of the Malfoys' power and influence. More than anything, there was Draco's subsequent alienation, including from many of his old Slytherin peers. Though clearly that was unaided by his and his mother's current situation. His father's name was a incumbrance that would remain even in death. Draco knew he had no future, that was evident in the way the Greengrasses had run a mile after the war, desperately reneging on the arranged marriage, no matter the vast fortune it cost them as they squirmed out of a legally-binding contract. Add to that the fact that Draco had no prospects, no money, no finished education, no one who would employ him. Instead, he was laden with a huge Manor full of bad memories, the lingering shadows of his ancestors, and the ghosts of his nightmares. It was a property with a haunting history that no one would touch even if Draco gave it away once his house arrest was over.

As far as Draco was concerned, his father was responsible for the multitude of misfortunes bestowed upon Draco's head.

So, no, he didn't know how he felt about the news about Lucius's ailing health. Reading between the lines, it was suspicious, Lucius Malfoy was too young to have heart and kidney failure. He suspected poisoning. He assumed Digitalis Purpurea as he knew it could cause heart and kidney failure, though who and how anyone had administered it to his father in Azkaban was anyone's guess. He was sure the Aurors wouldn't be overly fussed by investigating the suspicious circumstances. Still, Draco knew his father's death, no matter the cause, wouldn't give him the reprieve he so desperately needed but at least he'd be free from his father's expectations.