Chapter Text
The astrologer came first. He came from a family that had served pureblood houses for eleven generations, and he timed the conception itself: the month, the week, the phase of the moon. Narcissa found this the most humiliating part, though she did not say so.
After him came the rest. A thin, humourless arithmancer from Vienna cast charts across the dining table and declared the alignments masculine. A herbalist brought bitter infusions of black cohosh and something that smelled of iron and turned Narcissa's tongue grey for three days, and she drank them without complaint. She had been a Black before she was a Malfoy. A diviner in Knockturn Alley read smoke and promised a child who would be strong and proud and carry the family forward. When Lucius pressed him on specifics, the diviner watched his face and said what Lucius wanted to hear.
They had done everything right. When the labour came there was a great deal of blood, and the pain went on into the next morning. There were two mediwizards and a Healer from St Mungo's whose hands shook because she knew what it meant to lose a patient in this house. When it was over, and Narcissa was grey-faced and trembling and more emptied out than she had ever been, the Healer placed the child in her arms and said, with the careful neutrality of someone delivering bad news to dangerous people:
"A girl, Mrs Malfoy. A healthy girl."
Silence.
It did not last long. The Malfoys did not make scenes in front of the help. But it lasted long enough for the mediwizards to busy themselves with equipment and the Healer to find something in her bag that needed checking, and for perhaps four seconds the only people in the room were Lucius and Narcissa and the child who was not what they had ordered.
Narcissa looked at her daughter. The baby was red-faced, furious, screaming, as if she already knew she had arrived into a room that was not prepared for her.
Narcissa loved her, immediately and without permission.
"Draco," said Lucius.
Narcissa looked up. He was standing by the window, which he had been facing for those four seconds, and his expression was the one he wore at the Ministry: pleasant, composed, absolutely unreachable.
"We agreed on Draco," he said. As though the name they had chosen for their son was simply the name they had chosen for their child, and the conversation they would need to have later did not exist yet.
Narcissa understood it the way she understood everything about her husband: completely, and from a great distance.
"Draco," she said, looking down at her daughter, who had stopped screaming and was staring up at her with the unfocused, searching intensity of the newly born. "Her name is Draco."
—
The second pregnancy was not discussed. It was understood.
It began when Draco was five months old and could not yet roll over on her own.
This one was worse, as Narcissa had known it would be. In a private consultation Lucius did not attend, the Healer had told her that her body had not fully recovered, that the tearing had been significant, that another pregnancy so soon carried risks she should understand clearly. Narcissa had listened. She had also known, while listening, that none of it would change anything.
The astrologer, the arithmancer and the herbalist all returned. This time Narcissa performed the rituals with the efficiency of someone completing a distasteful task, and if anyone noticed that her hands were steadier and her eyes harder, they did not comment.
In the fifth month there was a little blood, enough to keep her in bed for three weeks, forbidden the stairs. A house-elf brought Draco to her twice a day, and the child sat on the coverlet pulling at her mother's hair and could not work out why she wasn't being held properly.
The birth was faster than the first and worse in every way that mattered. Narcissa made sounds she would never forgive herself for. The Healer's hands did not shake this time. She had brought a second Healer and lined up blood-replenishing potions on the bedside table like soldiers.
And when it was over:
"A boy, Mrs Malfoy."
Narcissa heard Lucius exhale. She had never heard him do that before. It was the sound of something unclenching that she had not known was clenched, and she realised he had been afraid that this too would fail, that he would have to ask her a third time, and that even his particular gift for not-seeing might not survive that. It had not occurred to him to be afraid for her.
He crossed the room and took the baby in both hands, and looked at him with an expression Narcissa had seen once before, on the day he first showed her the manor. Proprietary. Satisfied. Confirmed in something he had always believed about himself.
"Caelus," he said. "Caelus Lucius Malfoy."
When Lucius finally passed him over, Narcissa held Caelus against her chest. He was smaller than Draco had been, and quieter. He looked up at her with grey eyes, Lucius's eyes, not hers. She loved him too.
In the nursery down the hall, Draco was sleeping. She was fourteen months old, and she did not know that anything had changed.
—
Draco did accidental magic first. She was three. A vase in the drawing room rose off its table, wobbled in the air, and set itself down on the wrong table entirely. Lucius was told. That night, he looked at Draco across the dining table, nodded once, and said, "Good."
That was the end of it.
The following year, the curtains in Caelus's bedroom changed colour while he was napping. Green, then blue, then gold.
Lucius went up himself. He stood in the doorway looking at the curtains, and then he laughed, a sound so rare in that house that an elf on the landing dropped a candlestick. He ordered the curtains left gold. For weeks he told the story to anyone who came to dinner.
Draco heard him tell it to the Notts, with Caelus raised on cushions beside him. She was four. She ate all her vegetables and said thank you when the plates were cleared.
The next morning she took her brother out to the garden.
"You're a tree," she said.
Caelus considered this. He was two and three-quarters, and he took every game seriously. "What kind?"
"An oak. Oaks don't move."
He put his arms out. "Are these branches?"
"Yes. And trees can't talk, so you can't talk."
He nodded, then remembered he was a tree and stopped nodding. Draco walked away across the lawn, up the terrace steps, and sat on the stone balustrade with her chin in her hands. From there she could see him: a small boy in a blue jumper, arms out, perfectly still, while the peacocks stepped around him.
She watched for a long time. He didn't move. He didn't look for her. He simply trusted that the game was the game, and that she would come back.
It was nearly an hour before a house-elf found him. Draco heard its voice carry across the grass, high and anxious: "Young master must come in, young master's hands is cold." And Caelus's voice, very reasonable: "I can't. Draco said."
—
The tutors started when Draco was five: reading, writing, arithmetic, pureblood history, etiquette. More than most children learned in their first two years at Hogwarts.
Draco was good at lessons. She was the kind of student who finishes early and sits with her hands folded, waiting for the next chance to be right. She learned her letters in a week and could recite the Sacred Twenty-Eight by the end of the month. She memorised the family trees with a ferocity the tutor found slightly unsettling in a five-year-old.
Caelus sat in from the age of four, and drifted. He looked out of windows. He asked questions that had nothing to do with the material. Why is the lake that colour. What do the peacocks eat. Where does the post owl go when it isn't carrying letters. The tutor would redirect him gently, patient and almost fond. Caelus was the heir. Heirs were valuable and not yet finished, and one handled them accordingly.
When Draco lost focus, which was rarely, she got a sharpness in the voice and a look over the spectacles. She learned not to need correcting, so completely that within a few months the tutor had stopped watching her for mistakes.
On a Tuesday in October, Lucius took Caelus to the Ministry. Just Caelus. Draco watched them walk down the front path, her brother's hand in her father's, and asked her mother why she couldn't go.
Narcissa said something smooth and reasonable about it being a short trip, about the Ministry being dull, about another time. She said it with a composure so complete there was nowhere for an objection to find purchase.
Draco went to the window and watched the empty path until lunch.
They came back in the late afternoon. Caelus found her in the library and climbed onto the window seat beside her, still in his good robes, smelling of Floo powder.
"There's a fountain," he said. "With gold statues. A wizard and a witch and a centaur and a goblin and a house-elf, and the water comes out of the wand. And the lifts go sideways. Sideways, Draco."
"That sounds boring."
"It wasn't." He was swinging his legs, glowing with it. "A man in a green hat shook my hand. He called me Mr Malfoy. And Father said next time I can see his office, and sit in his chair, if I'm good."
Then he looked at her properly, and a small crease appeared between his eyebrows. "You could come next time. I'll ask him."
"Don't."
"Why not?"
Draco turned a page of the book she wasn't reading. "Because I don't want to."
He went away. A few minutes later he came back with his own book, climbed up beside her, and started to read.
—
In March, Lucius took Caelus to the Ministry again. Afterwards Caelus found Draco in the library and climbed up beside her.
"I didn't ask Father," he said, before she could speak. "About you coming. Because you said not to."
He said it proudly, as if he'd done something kind. Then he pulled a silver visitor's badge out of his pocket, with his name on it, and held it out so she could see the letters properly.
—
They visited other families: the Notts in Hampshire, the Parkinsons in Shropshire, the Crabbes, whose house smelled of damp and old leather. The sons were always introduced first. Lucius would bring Caelus forward with a hand on his shoulder and present him to whichever patriarch was hosting, and Draco stood one step behind. She could not remember learning to.
At the Parkinsons', Pansy stood one step behind her own father, and watched Draco across the drawing room with an expression that was either solidarity or assessment. Draco couldn't tell which.
The boys she was expected to sit with were Theodore Nott, who read; Vincent Crabbe, who broke things; and Gregory Goyle, who did whatever Vincent did. Caelus was polite to all of them without seeming to think about it. Draco thought about it all the time.
The Goyles had lost money in the war. Everyone knew, and everyone was too well-bred to say so. When Gregory came down to tea in robes slightly too long in the sleeve, Draco looked at them for a moment.
"Those are Vincent's old robes," she said, quite loudly. "They're too long on you."
Gregory went red to the ears. Mrs Goyle smiled thinly and offered more tea. Draco was right, and right was allowed.
That night, while an elf brushed out Draco's hair, Narcissa spoke from the doorway without coming in.
"That was clumsy," she said. "If you must say something like that, say it so that he thanks you for it."
Then she was gone.
A few days later an elf brought Draco tea in the nursery, and she looked at the cup and did not pick it up.
"This is Darjeeling," she said.
The elf's ears dropped. "Miss asked for —"
"I asked for Assam." She kept her voice very level, the way her mother did. "Do you think I can't tell the difference? Or do you think it doesn't matter what I want?"
The elf began to apologise, and then to tremble, and then its hands went towards the iron fireguard, and Draco said, "Oh, stop it. Leave it," and it vanished with a crack.
She drank the Darjeeling. It was fine.
Caelus said please and thank you to the elves. If he noticed their nerves when Draco spoke to them, he didn't connect it to anything. One evening she watched him thank the elf who brought his supper, and the elf was so startled it nearly dropped the tray.
When it had gone, Caelus frowned at the door. "Why did it look at me like that?"
"Because you thanked it."
"Shouldn't I?"
"Nobody does."
"Why not?"
Draco opened her mouth to tell him, and found there was nothing there. Only the shape of an answer she'd been given and never examined: because they're elves, because that's how it is, because Father doesn't. None of it sounded like a reason once she tried to say it aloud.
"Eat your supper," she said.