Chapter Text
The girl is small and slender, her skin so pale it’s almost translucent. Draco has not met her before. “Astoria.” She says, reaching for his hand with a stronger grip than he expected. When he hesitates, she says “And you’re Draco”, and steps forward towards the alter, pulling him along behind her.
He sees Potter a week later, leaving the market in Hogsmeade with Weas-with his wife. He gathers his cloak in tighter around him, thinks longingly about the apparition license his probation officer wouldn’t sign off on for another five years, and steps into the Floo.
Each time Pansy writes to Draco, Daphne writes to Astoria. Pansy writes short, messy notes on bright postcards that smell like champagne and lavender perfume. She tells Draco about wild nights in Milan, cruises near Athens, a magical night camped out in the desert in Uganda. Draco runs his thumb over her signature. The long P is pressed so hard into the paper he can feel the indentation, feel her friendship close. Daphne’s letters are pages long, the handwriting elegant and old-fashioned. Astoria reads them shut up in her rooms. Once, Draco hears her crying afterward.
The marriage was her idea. His parents had signed papers to betroth him to Daphne when he was nineteen, and he’d been too drunk on elf-made whisky to pay attention to what his father was proposing. He recognizes now that no amount of alcohol can make the shuddering reminders of his three pre-trial months listening to Azkaban’s bone-crunching nights go away. Back then, he had hoped.
The first night he went to Daphne’s for dinner, he’d stood in the garden after begging a minute away for some air, panic setting in. On the way back, he’d stumbled on the lowest step and seen something through the bushes that he wasn’t meant to-his finance, long blond hair covering her face as she passionately kissed a woman he recognized-short dark hair in a stern bob, disowned and working in a cheap Leeds bar by day. But by night-
“Pansy?”
Once he’d gotten over the fact that his best friend had for once, kept a secret from him, he had started to feel impossibly guilty. Marrying Daphne would tie her to an empty manor, relegate Pansy to a secret, an embarrassment, make both of them miserable. He was already miserable.
When Astoria wrote to him with a proposal of her own, he accepted without thinking about much at all.
In fact, he and Astoria might be good friends in another life. They share similar interests in alchemy and have the same ideas about arranging the garden. When they write to Pansy and Daphne, they tell them that yes, the Elderflower is helping Astoria’s heart, and no, they don’t feel pressured about having children. The money in the trust is lasting them fine, thank you.
It is all a lie.
After they have Scorpius, the curse accelerates. Before the wedding, it had seemed so straightforward in his head. Astoria had a trust from a grandfather who was fond of her and a curse that wouldn’t keep her healthy long enough to finish her alchemy mastership in Canada. He was a rejected, impoverished shell of a boy who had laughed and spit at the wrong people in school. And he’d never told his parents he was gay.
In her letter to him proposing marriage, Astoria wrote to him that they were already unhappy. Why couldn’t they be unhappy together, and let Daphne and Pansy be happy?
Ever since Scorpius has learned how to say “Mama”, Astoria has been drinking more.
By the time Scorpius is two, Astoria and Draco live in separate suites. Her parents are still so furious at Daphne that she hasn’t been any closer to England than Calais, and Astoria has kept descriptions of her illness vague enough that Daphne can’t be suspicious.
Draco has stopped responding to Pansy. He spends his days in the gardens with his son, playing with the peacocks, or walking to the Muggle village. Sometimes they take the Muggle bus to the nearest city, where they go to story hour at a Montessori school filled with people called “hipsters” who are far less suspicious of Draco’s robes. At night, he balances their dwindling ledgers. Astoria refuses to let Scorpius near Lucius, and he in turn refuses to give them money.
Scorpius asks after Mummy sometimes, and Draco says she’s not well. “It will be easier if he doesn’t remember me”, Astoria tells Draco, and sometimes he believes her. Other times, he cries himself to sleep after sitting on Scorpius' nursery floor for hours. His son doesn't sleep well if he's alone. Never has. He knows Astoria goes out to parties on the weekends she’s well enough to. What he doesn’t expect one cold Saturday in November is for the magio-ID coin he's Astoria's emergency contact on to call him to Soho and see Astoria slumped next to Potter.