Gift for irya_angelus
Author: chichiris_chica
Recipient: irya_angelus
Title: Lacquered Box
Pairing(s): Albus/Scorpius. A vague H/D hint if you squint really hard and tilt your head to the side.
Summary: On paper everything seems easier.
Rating: R
Warning(s): Fluff. All over the place.
Word Count: 2888
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
On paper everything seems easier.
It doesn’t matter what you write, but every word poured with ink on a flat surface becomes something you can touch, re-read, think over and turn in your mind again and again until it’s burnt into your brain. Spoken words vanish like the wind sometimes, carried away by the rushing time, nothing but a breath that fades away a second after you have uttered the words and disappears into nothingness.
Scorpius likes paper, the consistent touch of it beneath his fingertips, the rustle of the pages as he turns them in a book, the thrill of a letter from home, sealed with dark green wax and the way his father’s handwriting gracefully flows over the page or his mother’s fast scribble almost spills from it. He keeps all his notes, and never tries to erase the thin lines of written text from a book or piece of parchment if he can get away with it. At some point, those words must have meant something to him.
Sometimes he feels all his memories are made of paper.
Where were you?
The parchment’s tossed to Al before he can register the angry traces of his quill across it, before he leaves the quill on the table and stretches out his hand, suddenly tense and cramped despite his use to taking notes for extended periods of time. Al’s face doesn’t really change as he reads the note, and he calmly replies back on the stray parchment with a cheap blue ballpoint pen.
Busy.
They don’t talk for a week. That’s something Scorpius can easily do, and Al can’t. But not being able to write to him either, that’s harder. Scorpius regrets not having relented a couple of times as he finishes his paragraphs cleanly and tops them off with a perfect full stop, and then spends a few seconds with absolutely nothing to do as the teacher rambles on. He’s never doodled in his life, but that week he starts.
Lily doesn’t play quidditch. She feels she has better things to do with her time. Despite her father’s disbelief, she states that a game where a zillion players sweat to get a ball into a hoop while some other random idiot, who’s not even playing with the team anyway, searches for a golden glimpse and has the power to end the game and most of the time also win it all by himself is kind of pointless. She didn’t use the word idiot with her father, of course, but the implications were still able to almost give him a stroke.
It doesn’t mean she can’t fly, though, and just as she descends close to her brother she manages to make his broom sway strangely and drop Al a foot high from the floor with a satisfactory ‘oomph’. Her brother glares at her as she gracefully places her feet on the floor.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘What do you think you are doing?’ She snaps back, and for a second is tempted to sweep her brother off the floor with his own flashy racing broom. ‘I’ve seen your best friend on his own for a whole week. It’s taken a while, but by now I may even like him a bit already, you know?’
‘I’ve been busy. I’m really sorry I have not had the time. I have other friends as well, you know.’ Lily’s stare is flippant. An assortment of words for the place he pulled that excuse from hover close to her lips. ‘It’s…’
Al hadn’t liked it when she asked him for a little race. Once in a while he even surprises her with a response or two that have a small glimpse of intellect to them. The way he’s stuttering with silence now tells her that tonight isn’t going to be one of those special ocasions. He fumbles with his jacket for a second, then whips out a crumpled piece of paper that Lily snatches without a second thought. She reads it carefully and hands it back to her brother with an angry glare.
‘You’re such an asshole.’
‘No, Lily’, he quickly says, and this time his face falls and he looks so sorry that it’s almost like global warming is his entire fault. ‘It’s not- I just don’t know what to do.’
‘What, is it true?’
Al breathes in once and then holds it for a second that seems eternal to the two of them. ‘I don’t know, Lily.’ She looks back at the note and for a second she almost thinks he hasn’t said anything at all.
I’m sorry.
Al glances briefly to Scorpius, fidgeting, while his friend (he briefly wondered if he should have written, Are we still friends? instead, but the doubt itself would probably make Scorpius kill him in his sleep if the answer was going to be a yes) pretends he hasn’t seen the note. He knows Scorp is pretending because he’d be able to tell you with the exact words what the teacher had just said, reply to three notes without missing a beat and see a fly buzzing past if it hovered close to the book he’s reading while he keeps it hidden under the table.
Scorpius lets the note sit there under his textbook, untouched and without a reply. Al squirms. Scorpius ignores him. Al suffers. He looks back at the teacher and pretends to know what she’s going on about, scribbles nonsense on his otherwise perfectly messy but somewhat coherent notes and even fails to answer a direct question. When he has the time to look back defeatedly at his table he finds the note on his open book, and Scorpius’ reply neatly written under his.
Don’t you have more interesting people to see?
Al’s stomach contracts in physical pain. He takes the note again and his ballpoint and slowly and clearly writes out his response.
No. I don’t.
At lunch Al tries to explain what happened, but no explanation whatsoever would have been good enough. He tries not to flinch as Scorpius’ pale eyes observe every breath he takes and holds his hand steady as he hands over the old, crumpled note that seems to explain everything to him.
And there it stands, on Scorpius’ palm, scribbled in Ulric Renard’s unreadable handwriting, Team’s going to Hogsmeade this weekend, so do show up. Butterbeer for all. You can bring your girlfriend along.
The akward silence is broken when Scorpius, pale and quieter than usual utters the words ‘You are an idiot’, but they come without malice, so as Al claims that he knows, but he wonders where people get this ideas, Scorpius shares the last piece of cherry cake with him. They pretend it’s not important, that it’s nothing, it’s okay. But they both notice none of them actually denies anything or questions that it might be about someone else, and that already seems strange and heart-clenching to the two of them.
Scorpius slips the note into his pocket, and Al pretends he hasn’t seen a thing. He wonders if when Scorpius re-reads it he’ll think about that note as the stupidest reason for a week of silence ever or as a sign of something else that was maybe never there. Al goes to bed early that night, but he doesn’t fall asleep, wondering if he’s not self-projecting onto his friend.
Al doesn’t keep his notes. Most of the time he only finds the thrill in them as he’s writing them, passing them back and forth under a teacher’s nosy eyes (he’s always hoped combining nose and eyes were impossible, and goes to every potions class dreading such a side-effect), tossing them into a bin from far away to see if he can score.
But in a little green lacquered box, Scorpius keeps all of them, and Al has just found out. He sits for a moment on his own bed, with the opened box on his lap, running his fingers through the ragged edges of the notes, some of them from last week, some of them dating back to the day they met. He reads a couple and is able to recall when one of them happened, but he’s forgotten the others and it annoys him to no end. The silent empty room doesn’t feel as filled with meaning as that box, with these scattered paper memories spilling from their little confinement, the box not big enough to keep their history together.
Scorpius walks into the room a while after Al has put the box back in its place under Scorpius’ carefully made bed, with a green extra blanket draped over the edge. He thinks about the new note Scorpius will find atop the pile, in carefully folded, pristine paper. He wonders what he’ll say. And just as he raises his eyes to look at Scorpius, he finds his friend is already by his bed.
His voice is threadbare when he asks, ‘What’s this?’, and he’s looking so unsure as opposed to his usual demeanor that Al panics for a second, and with a reason. The note is folded in his hand, and Al doesn’t take it. They both know what’s in it.
‘Is it so terrible?’
‘I didn’t say- Stop that.’ Scorpius suddenly snaps, and his eyes flash angrily. Al wonders if he has pushed this too far. ‘Stop it. Stop not talking to me when something like this comes up and then not thinking about it.’ His voice starts to raise and Al is really glad that in the end the others went to Hogsmeade without him. ‘Stop watching me when I scribble notes. Stop pretending you read over my shoulder. And don’t give me your blankets when I’m cold. Stop not being clear about it.’ Scorpius’ voice is steady and raw when he asks, ‘Now, what does this mean?’
Al looks at him in silence for a second, at the slight flush over his cheeks brought on by anger, or shame, or desire, at the way his mouth is not quite closed after his snarl, at the way his eyes are blazing and his chest seems heavy as he regains his composture. He takes a leap of faith.
Scorpius’ lips feel soft against his, warm against his tongue. Neither moves for a second. Scorpius looks at him confused, then in awe, then in something that has to be a mixture of the two. And leans into him again.
Al doesn’t know at what point Scorpius’ back ended up against the wall, but it was probably at the same time he decided to lick a path up Scorpius’ neck and his legs sort of gave in, right before his hands slid under his shirt to map out the pale expanse of skin. In the end, they’re on the floor even though their beds are each a foot away, and Al remembers the look on Scorpius’ face, the way he frowned in concentration as they touched and the wish to kiss his lips until they felt raw.
The note lays on the floor, but for now that’s alright. Scorpius’ skin is feverish under his, and his nails scrape over Al’s back when he bites his lip and then falls limp and out of breath.
I love you.
Letters home become sort of chaotic after that.
I’m in love with Scorpius Malfoy.
Harry paces his living room up and down for about half an hour after reading the short note, wondering if his son has been enchanted, is inebriated or is trying to inherit soon. He also wonders where they went wrong, but since he attaches that one to parenthood, he skips it.
‘Wasn’t it you who said the Malfoys weren’t that bad, after all?’ Ginny says from the most confortable chair, sitting quietly and strangely calm with the note still in her hand. She tucks a stray strand of fiery hair behind her ear and looks at her husband with a smile that says she’s not laughing at this, dear, she’s just laughing at him.
‘I never really thought of something like this’, Harry responds, and the saddest thing is that he means it. He spends a second later thinking how he didn’t think about it, if only for a second and perfectly logical reasons. Like why Albus never mentioned any girls and spoke about Scorpius in every letter. Harry has the image of that boy’s ‘silver eyes’ and ‘almost translucent skin, so he’s always getting burnt’ stuck in his brain, and the worst is the knowledge that deep inside he never knew if the image he conjured with that description was really of his son’s friend.
‘Well, one would think that after the scandal about Dumbledore you would have considered a new possibility or two.’ Ginny’s ease is not helping. Harry thinks if it’s something only a mother would do.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Well, that’s who we named him after?’ Harry freezes for a second before he makes his next reply.
‘Ginny, that is not the problem. It’s Scorpius Malfoy.’
‘Who we know since he was eleven and who’s been spending a week at home since they became friends.’
‘Fow how long has that happened, now?’
‘Since they stepped on the train, I’m afraid.’
‘And is there a reason all of this should sound new to me?’ The stare makes him lose his voice on the spot.
‘Harry,’ Ginny calmly says. ‘I am worried about him as well, for many reasons. Lots of things could happen to him because of this, and not all of them good. It’s normal to worry, we are his parents.’
‘Ginny, my son has just said-‘
‘I know what our son has just said, Harry.’ She flatly replies. ‘And I am as shocked as you are,’ not really, Harry didn’t think she really was, ‘but maybe we should let him speak before we lecture him about falling in love, what do you think?’
‘Talk to him?’ Draco practically bellows at his tranquil wife, and the maid pretends to have forgotten something of vital importance in the other room and flees in panic.
‘And what else can you do? Disown your only heir?’
‘Our only heir,’ Draco tries to reason. Astoria is unfazed, and doesn’t lift her eyes from her book. She calmly takes another sip of her green tea and raises the corner of her lip in pleasure at the herbal taste. ‘Have you thought about that?’
‘Hmm?’ Astoria tilts her head to her husband but doesn’t shift her position in the chaise longue. ‘Why should that worry you more than your son’s happiness?’
‘Of course it doesn’t, but-‘
‘But?’, she repeats languidly, the word rolling slowly over her tongue. Draco thinks that she really, really hasn’t heard a thing or even read her son’s extensive letter, because he’s sure that with her autumn-coloured hair cascading all around her and in such a relaxed position he wouldn’t have really bothered to listen to much at all. ‘Can there ever be a but to that, do you think?’
Draco thinks about his son. ‘No,’ he mutters. ‘No, there never can.’
‘Then breathe,’ she sentences, and her breath seems even more tired and long as she exhales at that last syllable. ‘And accept things as they come. What would you have done in his place?’
Draco hasn’t wanted to think about that one. What would he have done, in love with a man his family would have probably rejected? What would he have done if he’d been able to reach out and touch bravery made flesh, with daring green eyes and offering a second chance? Draco hasn’t thought about those moments that have already passed, because his wife and son are everything he has now, and everything else has just faded like the words of a song hummed late when it’s not heard by anyone at all. Maybe Scorpius’ place was his father’s long ago, but his son has just been braver when faced with the choice.
‘Astoria,’ Draco says, shaking his head in defeat. ‘What do I tell him?’
‘Oh, you really don’t have to say anything to him at all.’ She says, then takes another sip of tea. ‘I have already replied to his lovely letter.’
‘You have?’, Draco asks, in shock. ‘When? And what did you tell him about this?’
‘That we love him.’ She lifts her eyes from her book now, and her voice seems less slothish and airy as she tilts her head to the silver teapot on the little carved wood table and sticks her cup in her husband’s hands. ‘Refill?’
Al and Scorpius walk side by side the day they graduate, solid and warm against one another, and the sight of their families a few feet away doesn’t help them want to leave each other’s side.
‘My father is going to kill me,’ Al says.
‘Your father is going to kill me,’ Scorpius corrects.
‘That as well. Is it too late to pretend we haven’t been here at all?’
‘They’ve seen us. And you can’t do that, you’ll have to talk to them. They’re our families.’
Al thinks for a second. ‘We can send them a note.’
Scorpius reaches into his pocket and feels the now-battered edges of the paper, traces the familiar fold again and remembers what it says. And smiles.
Recipient: irya_angelus
Title: Lacquered Box
Pairing(s): Albus/Scorpius. A vague H/D hint if you squint really hard and tilt your head to the side.
Summary: On paper everything seems easier.
Rating: R
Warning(s): Fluff. All over the place.
Word Count: 2888
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
On paper everything seems easier.
It doesn’t matter what you write, but every word poured with ink on a flat surface becomes something you can touch, re-read, think over and turn in your mind again and again until it’s burnt into your brain. Spoken words vanish like the wind sometimes, carried away by the rushing time, nothing but a breath that fades away a second after you have uttered the words and disappears into nothingness.
Scorpius likes paper, the consistent touch of it beneath his fingertips, the rustle of the pages as he turns them in a book, the thrill of a letter from home, sealed with dark green wax and the way his father’s handwriting gracefully flows over the page or his mother’s fast scribble almost spills from it. He keeps all his notes, and never tries to erase the thin lines of written text from a book or piece of parchment if he can get away with it. At some point, those words must have meant something to him.
Sometimes he feels all his memories are made of paper.
Where were you?
The parchment’s tossed to Al before he can register the angry traces of his quill across it, before he leaves the quill on the table and stretches out his hand, suddenly tense and cramped despite his use to taking notes for extended periods of time. Al’s face doesn’t really change as he reads the note, and he calmly replies back on the stray parchment with a cheap blue ballpoint pen.
Busy.
They don’t talk for a week. That’s something Scorpius can easily do, and Al can’t. But not being able to write to him either, that’s harder. Scorpius regrets not having relented a couple of times as he finishes his paragraphs cleanly and tops them off with a perfect full stop, and then spends a few seconds with absolutely nothing to do as the teacher rambles on. He’s never doodled in his life, but that week he starts.
Lily doesn’t play quidditch. She feels she has better things to do with her time. Despite her father’s disbelief, she states that a game where a zillion players sweat to get a ball into a hoop while some other random idiot, who’s not even playing with the team anyway, searches for a golden glimpse and has the power to end the game and most of the time also win it all by himself is kind of pointless. She didn’t use the word idiot with her father, of course, but the implications were still able to almost give him a stroke.
It doesn’t mean she can’t fly, though, and just as she descends close to her brother she manages to make his broom sway strangely and drop Al a foot high from the floor with a satisfactory ‘oomph’. Her brother glares at her as she gracefully places her feet on the floor.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘What do you think you are doing?’ She snaps back, and for a second is tempted to sweep her brother off the floor with his own flashy racing broom. ‘I’ve seen your best friend on his own for a whole week. It’s taken a while, but by now I may even like him a bit already, you know?’
‘I’ve been busy. I’m really sorry I have not had the time. I have other friends as well, you know.’ Lily’s stare is flippant. An assortment of words for the place he pulled that excuse from hover close to her lips. ‘It’s…’
Al hadn’t liked it when she asked him for a little race. Once in a while he even surprises her with a response or two that have a small glimpse of intellect to them. The way he’s stuttering with silence now tells her that tonight isn’t going to be one of those special ocasions. He fumbles with his jacket for a second, then whips out a crumpled piece of paper that Lily snatches without a second thought. She reads it carefully and hands it back to her brother with an angry glare.
‘You’re such an asshole.’
‘No, Lily’, he quickly says, and this time his face falls and he looks so sorry that it’s almost like global warming is his entire fault. ‘It’s not- I just don’t know what to do.’
‘What, is it true?’
Al breathes in once and then holds it for a second that seems eternal to the two of them. ‘I don’t know, Lily.’ She looks back at the note and for a second she almost thinks he hasn’t said anything at all.
I’m sorry.
Al glances briefly to Scorpius, fidgeting, while his friend (he briefly wondered if he should have written, Are we still friends? instead, but the doubt itself would probably make Scorpius kill him in his sleep if the answer was going to be a yes) pretends he hasn’t seen the note. He knows Scorp is pretending because he’d be able to tell you with the exact words what the teacher had just said, reply to three notes without missing a beat and see a fly buzzing past if it hovered close to the book he’s reading while he keeps it hidden under the table.
Scorpius lets the note sit there under his textbook, untouched and without a reply. Al squirms. Scorpius ignores him. Al suffers. He looks back at the teacher and pretends to know what she’s going on about, scribbles nonsense on his otherwise perfectly messy but somewhat coherent notes and even fails to answer a direct question. When he has the time to look back defeatedly at his table he finds the note on his open book, and Scorpius’ reply neatly written under his.
Don’t you have more interesting people to see?
Al’s stomach contracts in physical pain. He takes the note again and his ballpoint and slowly and clearly writes out his response.
No. I don’t.
At lunch Al tries to explain what happened, but no explanation whatsoever would have been good enough. He tries not to flinch as Scorpius’ pale eyes observe every breath he takes and holds his hand steady as he hands over the old, crumpled note that seems to explain everything to him.
And there it stands, on Scorpius’ palm, scribbled in Ulric Renard’s unreadable handwriting, Team’s going to Hogsmeade this weekend, so do show up. Butterbeer for all. You can bring your girlfriend along.
The akward silence is broken when Scorpius, pale and quieter than usual utters the words ‘You are an idiot’, but they come without malice, so as Al claims that he knows, but he wonders where people get this ideas, Scorpius shares the last piece of cherry cake with him. They pretend it’s not important, that it’s nothing, it’s okay. But they both notice none of them actually denies anything or questions that it might be about someone else, and that already seems strange and heart-clenching to the two of them.
Scorpius slips the note into his pocket, and Al pretends he hasn’t seen a thing. He wonders if when Scorpius re-reads it he’ll think about that note as the stupidest reason for a week of silence ever or as a sign of something else that was maybe never there. Al goes to bed early that night, but he doesn’t fall asleep, wondering if he’s not self-projecting onto his friend.
Al doesn’t keep his notes. Most of the time he only finds the thrill in them as he’s writing them, passing them back and forth under a teacher’s nosy eyes (he’s always hoped combining nose and eyes were impossible, and goes to every potions class dreading such a side-effect), tossing them into a bin from far away to see if he can score.
But in a little green lacquered box, Scorpius keeps all of them, and Al has just found out. He sits for a moment on his own bed, with the opened box on his lap, running his fingers through the ragged edges of the notes, some of them from last week, some of them dating back to the day they met. He reads a couple and is able to recall when one of them happened, but he’s forgotten the others and it annoys him to no end. The silent empty room doesn’t feel as filled with meaning as that box, with these scattered paper memories spilling from their little confinement, the box not big enough to keep their history together.
Scorpius walks into the room a while after Al has put the box back in its place under Scorpius’ carefully made bed, with a green extra blanket draped over the edge. He thinks about the new note Scorpius will find atop the pile, in carefully folded, pristine paper. He wonders what he’ll say. And just as he raises his eyes to look at Scorpius, he finds his friend is already by his bed.
His voice is threadbare when he asks, ‘What’s this?’, and he’s looking so unsure as opposed to his usual demeanor that Al panics for a second, and with a reason. The note is folded in his hand, and Al doesn’t take it. They both know what’s in it.
‘Is it so terrible?’
‘I didn’t say- Stop that.’ Scorpius suddenly snaps, and his eyes flash angrily. Al wonders if he has pushed this too far. ‘Stop it. Stop not talking to me when something like this comes up and then not thinking about it.’ His voice starts to raise and Al is really glad that in the end the others went to Hogsmeade without him. ‘Stop watching me when I scribble notes. Stop pretending you read over my shoulder. And don’t give me your blankets when I’m cold. Stop not being clear about it.’ Scorpius’ voice is steady and raw when he asks, ‘Now, what does this mean?’
Al looks at him in silence for a second, at the slight flush over his cheeks brought on by anger, or shame, or desire, at the way his mouth is not quite closed after his snarl, at the way his eyes are blazing and his chest seems heavy as he regains his composture. He takes a leap of faith.
Scorpius’ lips feel soft against his, warm against his tongue. Neither moves for a second. Scorpius looks at him confused, then in awe, then in something that has to be a mixture of the two. And leans into him again.
Al doesn’t know at what point Scorpius’ back ended up against the wall, but it was probably at the same time he decided to lick a path up Scorpius’ neck and his legs sort of gave in, right before his hands slid under his shirt to map out the pale expanse of skin. In the end, they’re on the floor even though their beds are each a foot away, and Al remembers the look on Scorpius’ face, the way he frowned in concentration as they touched and the wish to kiss his lips until they felt raw.
The note lays on the floor, but for now that’s alright. Scorpius’ skin is feverish under his, and his nails scrape over Al’s back when he bites his lip and then falls limp and out of breath.
I love you.
Letters home become sort of chaotic after that.
I’m in love with Scorpius Malfoy.
Harry paces his living room up and down for about half an hour after reading the short note, wondering if his son has been enchanted, is inebriated or is trying to inherit soon. He also wonders where they went wrong, but since he attaches that one to parenthood, he skips it.
‘Wasn’t it you who said the Malfoys weren’t that bad, after all?’ Ginny says from the most confortable chair, sitting quietly and strangely calm with the note still in her hand. She tucks a stray strand of fiery hair behind her ear and looks at her husband with a smile that says she’s not laughing at this, dear, she’s just laughing at him.
‘I never really thought of something like this’, Harry responds, and the saddest thing is that he means it. He spends a second later thinking how he didn’t think about it, if only for a second and perfectly logical reasons. Like why Albus never mentioned any girls and spoke about Scorpius in every letter. Harry has the image of that boy’s ‘silver eyes’ and ‘almost translucent skin, so he’s always getting burnt’ stuck in his brain, and the worst is the knowledge that deep inside he never knew if the image he conjured with that description was really of his son’s friend.
‘Well, one would think that after the scandal about Dumbledore you would have considered a new possibility or two.’ Ginny’s ease is not helping. Harry thinks if it’s something only a mother would do.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Well, that’s who we named him after?’ Harry freezes for a second before he makes his next reply.
‘Ginny, that is not the problem. It’s Scorpius Malfoy.’
‘Who we know since he was eleven and who’s been spending a week at home since they became friends.’
‘Fow how long has that happened, now?’
‘Since they stepped on the train, I’m afraid.’
‘And is there a reason all of this should sound new to me?’ The stare makes him lose his voice on the spot.
‘Harry,’ Ginny calmly says. ‘I am worried about him as well, for many reasons. Lots of things could happen to him because of this, and not all of them good. It’s normal to worry, we are his parents.’
‘Ginny, my son has just said-‘
‘I know what our son has just said, Harry.’ She flatly replies. ‘And I am as shocked as you are,’ not really, Harry didn’t think she really was, ‘but maybe we should let him speak before we lecture him about falling in love, what do you think?’
‘Talk to him?’ Draco practically bellows at his tranquil wife, and the maid pretends to have forgotten something of vital importance in the other room and flees in panic.
‘And what else can you do? Disown your only heir?’
‘Our only heir,’ Draco tries to reason. Astoria is unfazed, and doesn’t lift her eyes from her book. She calmly takes another sip of her green tea and raises the corner of her lip in pleasure at the herbal taste. ‘Have you thought about that?’
‘Hmm?’ Astoria tilts her head to her husband but doesn’t shift her position in the chaise longue. ‘Why should that worry you more than your son’s happiness?’
‘Of course it doesn’t, but-‘
‘But?’, she repeats languidly, the word rolling slowly over her tongue. Draco thinks that she really, really hasn’t heard a thing or even read her son’s extensive letter, because he’s sure that with her autumn-coloured hair cascading all around her and in such a relaxed position he wouldn’t have really bothered to listen to much at all. ‘Can there ever be a but to that, do you think?’
Draco thinks about his son. ‘No,’ he mutters. ‘No, there never can.’
‘Then breathe,’ she sentences, and her breath seems even more tired and long as she exhales at that last syllable. ‘And accept things as they come. What would you have done in his place?’
Draco hasn’t wanted to think about that one. What would he have done, in love with a man his family would have probably rejected? What would he have done if he’d been able to reach out and touch bravery made flesh, with daring green eyes and offering a second chance? Draco hasn’t thought about those moments that have already passed, because his wife and son are everything he has now, and everything else has just faded like the words of a song hummed late when it’s not heard by anyone at all. Maybe Scorpius’ place was his father’s long ago, but his son has just been braver when faced with the choice.
‘Astoria,’ Draco says, shaking his head in defeat. ‘What do I tell him?’
‘Oh, you really don’t have to say anything to him at all.’ She says, then takes another sip of tea. ‘I have already replied to his lovely letter.’
‘You have?’, Draco asks, in shock. ‘When? And what did you tell him about this?’
‘That we love him.’ She lifts her eyes from her book now, and her voice seems less slothish and airy as she tilts her head to the silver teapot on the little carved wood table and sticks her cup in her husband’s hands. ‘Refill?’
Al and Scorpius walk side by side the day they graduate, solid and warm against one another, and the sight of their families a few feet away doesn’t help them want to leave each other’s side.
‘My father is going to kill me,’ Al says.
‘Your father is going to kill me,’ Scorpius corrects.
‘That as well. Is it too late to pretend we haven’t been here at all?’
‘They’ve seen us. And you can’t do that, you’ll have to talk to them. They’re our families.’
Al thinks for a second. ‘We can send them a note.’
Scorpius reaches into his pocket and feels the now-battered edges of the paper, traces the familiar fold again and remembers what it says. And smiles.