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It was a quiet spring day full of soft breezes and gentle twittering of the birds. A window let the air into his office, adding to the collective sounds of the crackling lime green fire in the opposite corner. Only the shuffling of paper and marking of a quill disrupted the natural sounds in his ornate office.
Lucius Malfoy sat at his opulent desk working on documents for the ministry in focused silence. His hair was up in a loose ponytail, something he rarely did outside of the casual environment of the Malfoy manor. His cloak draped over the side of his velvet green chair, allowing his white dress shirt's rolled up sleeves and the usually hidden shape of his Dark Mark to reveal themselves in the soft light from the spring sunshine. He was looking at a particularly tiny and intricate cursive from a proposal sent to him the day before for proofreading when the door to his office was fumbled open.
The older man couldn’t help the slight curve to his lips as pitter-pattering steps that tried to act confident and be quiet made their way toward him. Lucius only allowed himself to smile when he felt the telltale tug of a tiny and insistent hand.
“Didn’t your mother teach you manners, Little Dragon? A gentleman does not tug on another’s dress robes to gain their attention.” He sets down the paper with the aggravatingly tiny script and looks down at the little one beside him.
Draco looks up at his father with wide, innocent silver eyes and a slightly sheepish look on his five-year-old face. The little hand that had tugged at his father’s dress shirt pulls away and fidgets with its twin for a moment before Lucius carefully moves them apart and down at the small boy's sides. He wanted his son to avoid such a habit as early as possible, after all. The five year old wiggles his mouth in thought before finally speaking, eyes never leaving his father’s face.
“Can you show me your wand again?” At Lucius’ raised brow the boy shifts from side to side. “P-please?”
Lucius hummed, reaching down and lifting his son up with practiced ease. “I suppose I can show you now, so long as you don’t tell your mother you're distracting me from my work, hmm?” He said and leaned in inquisitively. He chuckled at the enthusiastic nod before pulling out his wand from its hidden sheath.
Tiny hands touched the elm reverently, quicksilver eyes tracing its shape and brushing over the snake-headed handle. Lucius watched quietly, enjoying the curiosity that was so clear on his son’s face and noticing the tell-tale sign the boy was seeing far more than was obvious to the normal eyes of your everyday witch or wizard.
“What do you see today, Little Dragon?” The boy's hands stopped for a moment before continuing their gentle glide over the wand.
“Storm clouds… a-and I can smell flowers? Hmm.” Draco squinted at the wand before looking at his father with the innocents only a child could contain. “He’s upset with you today.”
He couldn’t help himself, Lucius chuckled as he held his son closer to him. Their striking white blond hair seemed to shimmer in the light. “Oh? Why is… ‘he’ upset with me?” He was amused to see his son’s face scrunch up in thought like the question was worthy of all his cognitive facilities.
Looking back at the wand, Draco hummed before seeming to jolt and look back at his father with new insight only he seemed to have. “You haven't used him today!”
Lucius laughed. “Is this just an excuse for you to see me use magic?”
A vibrant blush of embarrassment filled the boy's cheeks before he turned away, fidgeting and hunching a little. Lucius decided not to scold him for his reserved tendencies for now. “... I like your magic.”
Sighing but feeling the joy of the quiet confession, the man pulled his wand away from his son gently before swishing it around elegantly and feeling the gentle thrum of magic flow through it. Quietly, he uttered a simple folding spell and watched as the paper he had just been looking over, folded elegantly into an origami bird. It opened its mouth as if to make a sound before hopping over towards his son where innocent eyes followed its every move.
Draco held out his hands for the false bird, letting out a soft squeak when the paper flapped into his hands and elicited another soft chuckle from his father behind him. When the boy brought it closer to himself to inspect, the little paper bird hopped onto the boy's head and received a stunned look from the boy and a bark of laughter from Lucius.
After a few minutes of playing with the origami creature, Lucius relaxed his magic and let the paper flutter back onto the desk as if it never was alive in the first place.
“Can you teach me that spell? Please?” Draco asked with dazzling attentiveness. It was a wonder why his tutors had trouble getting him to focus.
Lucius hummed, “I suppose I could. Why don’t you tell me what you saw?”
Draco squinted his eyes in thought. “I saw little blue wisps? Like spirals following the paper. It was like the storm clouds but sky blue not dark blue!”
“That would correlate with the nature of the form the paper took.” Lucius handed his son his wand carefully as he explained. “If I had made the paper into a fish, the magic would have acted more like water and less like wind.”
As he showed his son how the magic flowed through his wand and then the wandless version, creating another bird with a gentle blow from his mouth, Lucius thought about how his son was not like he expected him to be. Draco’s eyes seemed to glow slightly as if there was a film over them that made the silver within glitter. It was an odd phenomenon that showed up rarely in some wizards or witches, where they could physically feel or understand the very personality or nature of magic or a spell. Sometimes, Draco gave off the opinion that he could sometimes taste or smell the magic itself when he described something to him. Like how a simple golden Lumos spell could look like sunflowers in fresh bloom and taste like marmalade made from the Nott’s orchards, or an Aquamenti feeling like a gentle stream in summer or a rapid river depending on the spell's intensity.
It truly became apparent to them that something was different about their son when he had seen the Dark Mark on Lucius’ skin for the first time and froze. He couldn’t forget the absolute fear and disgust he saw on Draco’s face or the way his son seemed to shake and drift away from his father’s touch.
“Father… what is that? It’s making my skin itch and… my head… feels fuzzy.” Draco had collapsed not long after, coming down with a strange fever that seemed to grow worse when Lucius was near. Narcissa wouldn’t let him visit their son in his bedroom for days.
No pain was truly as devastating as losing the privilege to be with his son.
Draco’s strong connection with magic made a few things clear for them and their family moving forward. It was an ability that Lucius and Narcissa could both agree would bring their son many challenges later in life. So they did everything in their power to ease their son into the magical world and how to react in such a way that people wouldn’t try to use him.
And the first step in that journey had been to get the boy used to the dark mark on his father’s forearm.
Lucius looked down at his son in his lap, so much like himself but with elegance so purely from his mother it was practically magic in its own right. Subtly, he moved the arm revealing the cursed ink on his skin into the boy’s perception range, and felt the boy freeze in his ministrations. Draco shifted slightly, a subtle tremor beginning in his body. The only thing to disrupt their stillness was a small gust through the window.
Small, innocent, pure hands reached out slowly and placed themselves carefully around the dark mark. Draco’s thumb brushed over the edge of it and flinched back as if touching something surprisingly painful. Lucius took a deep, centering breath before carding his hand through his son’s soft hair.
“What do you see?”
Draco moved gingerly away from the arm but kept his focus there, on the dark, slithering shape that brought discomfort on certain days for the man who bore it. Lucius couldn’t see his son’s face, and couldn’t begin to tell what his body language meant, so he just… waited.
“It hurts.” The soft voice finally answered. “Like needles. It’s dripping from your arm, sticking to it. It’s like ink but…” Draco shivered. “It feels like poison. Like hot iron. It glows a little… green but not green like mom’s garden… sickly? N-nausi-naowsi-”
“Nauseating.” Lucius gently corrects.
“-it shifts? But blurry like it's in two places at once? I don’t…” Draco is shivering harder now. “Dad… the magic is full of hate.”
Lucius hushes his son, pulling his shaking form closer to himself and quickly rolls down his sleeve to stave off some of the effect. Draco clung to him, curling up close to his chest as he calmed himself. The crackling fire seemed to pop in displeasure that the soothing atmosphere suddenly changed.
There’s a time in every person's life, where something happens to force you into changing your perspective or losing what you have. Lucius believes that Draco is that point. Even after marrying Narcissa, he never saw any point in changing who he was, what ideals he had, or rethinking how he viewed the world. But suddenly, Narcissa became pregnant and they announced the arrival of the Malfoy heir and if everything had stayed the way he expected, he would have viewed the boy with some love but also saw him as nothing but his role.
Narcissa wouldn’t have pulled him aside and had hour-long discussions about what they should do. He wouldn’t have worried for the boy's health or how to deal with the sudden target the child would have. The complaints from their tutors wouldn’t have been a concern so long as Draco made the required progress of an heir. Two parents who hadn’t felt the same protective love in their own families, wouldn’t have directed it at the boy with eyes that could see the secrets in their world.
Because Lucius would have still felt that hate that swirled around in his Dark Mark. He would have remained spiteful at the world for changing and stealing all that was sacred to their traditions. He would have still thought others, born from Muggles or of a beast-like nature, were lesser.
The Dark Mark was like a sign that the water was poisoned… and it took listening to his five-year-old son with the gift of magic sight to really process that. But he knew, this was only the start.
“...Why do you have that mark, Father?” Draco whispered. His shaking had diminished slightly but was still prevalent.
Lucius sighed. “When I was young, and foolish, I thought the world was out to get our kind, ruin our traditions and beliefs because Mud- Muggleborns began to outnumber us.” He rested his chin on his son’s head as he thought over his words carefully. “I was afraid. Change is such a scary experience and it has and will be a hard potion to swallow. I may regret that decision now, only because of those who have entered my life and begun to shift my perspective.”
“You get scared, too?”
He couldn’t help holding the boy closer, closing his eyes at the wave of emotion within him. “Everyone feels fear, Little Dragon. Your mother and I feel it, the house elves feel it, dragon’s even feel it. It is not an emotion that is restricted to age or fought with wisdom. It can only be conquered by courage, after all.”
“...I don’t think I'll have courage.” And Lucius’ heart ached at those words.
“Now you listen here, Draco Lucius Malfoy.” He pulled the boy away from himself so he could look into wide silver eyes that glittered like the stars. “You are the heir of two widely prestigious family lines. Not only that but the son of myself and the strongest witch I’ve ever had the pleasure of being in love with. You may not feel it now, but there is courage in our cunning, in our ability to see the brighter picture and make the proper choices. And your senses in particular will never leave you astray.” Lucius leaned forward, connecting with Draco’s forehead. “Time and experience will guide you, Little Dragon. Your blood will ensure it.”
With a shaky nod, Lucius and Draco shifted back into a comfortable position once more, with Lucius reading over the proposal and his son fiddling with his wand.
“...do you regret it?” a gentle whisper reached the man’s ears as he finally marked the hideous proposal with a rejection.
“Regardless of if I regret it or not, the mark will always follow me. It is up to time that will determine if it truly was a mistake.”