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He did it. After two long years, he finally dealt with his wounds. Or wound, rather.
It tugged at his heartstrings, seeing the two stuffed toys sat at the foot of his parents’ gravestones. A beaver and a ferret.
It’s the first time he’s seen their graves.
“Scorpius?”
Quickly wiping at his face, Scorpius turned at the sound of her voice. His heart pounded against his chest, almost as if it was trying to escape its cage.
The chaotic wind splashed her auburn hair across her face. Her tan skin that she inherited from her mother, Padma Patil-Weasley, glowed in the light of the setting sun.
“Scorpius?” she said again, her lips dancing as she said his name.
“How long have you been here?” he asked her.
“Multiple lifetimes.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding!”
“Seriously, Rose?” Scorpius said, looking at his– well, he didn’t know what they were yet.
“A minute or ten,” Rose replied with a shrug. “How have you been?”
What kind of a question was that? She asked as though she hadn’t witnessed even a bit of his full-on breakdown. “Amazing.”
“Want to do something fun?” Rose asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Your idea of fun always involves risk.”
“That’s what makes it fun!”
“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” Scorpius shrugged. He really wasn’t in the mood for an adventure at the moment.
Rose rolled her eyes. “You’re so boring! I was going to suggest skydiving but you’re obviously too scared.”
“If that is anything like it sounds, I’m out.”
Anyone would be fucking insane to dive from the sky. The last time Scorpius checked, that was called suicide. “Can we do something more… normal?”
“Illegal motorcycle racing?” Rose suggested. “Bungee jumping, tree-top trekking– have I mentioned hang gliding? It’s where you’re hooked to this parachute thing that’s hooked to a plane and–”
Her eyes grew wide until he said, “No. And it’s almost night anyway.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Fine. You think of something better.”
What? She expected him to think of something fun? The last time he checked, she was the well rounded Gryffindor and he was the nerdy Slytherin with one friend that often acted like he was running on half a brain cell.
“We can just talk,” Scorpius suggested. Rose was a good conversationalist most of the time.
“That is dull.”
“Might I suggest,” Scorpius lazily grinned, speaking in his most charming voice, “that we watch the beautiful reds and oranges that swim across the horizon slowly melt away to the darkness of the night sky with tiny glittering stars that shine like jewels?”
“Sounds anticlimactic.”
“We can eat cereal,” Scorpius added with a shrug.
Eating cereal? That’s fun, right? He remembered when his mother introduced him to the joys of breakfast cereal when he was four. There was no going wrong with Special K cereal. It was way better than the fancy meals that the Malfoy house-elves created every morning. Not that the meals were bad, it’s just cereal over full English any day. Except for hash browns. Those were one of the few things in the world better than cereal.
She laughed. The corners of her eyes crinkled as she threw her head back. It made his heart skip a beat. “Only if you pour the milk first.”
Scorpius decided to ignore the crime against humanity that she wanted him to commit.
Some people are worth breaking the rules of cereal for.
~
Nope. Milk before cereal was a complete crime. Now his cereal was all soggy and gross.
“Aren’t you going to eat it?” Rose nudged.
He grunted non-committedly as he played with the disgusting mush that he was apparently supposed to eat. Was anyone really worth eating soggy cereal for?
It reminded him vaguely of the first time his father caved in and tried a bowl of Cheerios At first it came as a shock that Draco Malfoy attempted to eat some muggle breakfast food. But both Scorpius and Hermione’s shock was replaced with fear as he poured the milk into his bowl first.
He stared fondly at the mush. Not because it was delightful, but because of the memory. He wouldn’t have thought back then, at the age of seven, that his parents would leave him all alone in this big, dark, brutal world.
Since his parents died, Scorpius had to raise himself. His grandparents were hardly good influences. He went from being the kid who, at the age of sixteen, had his parents answer all the questions at the Healers’ to the young man who had to stand in front of the many Daily Prophet reporters and answer their rather intrusive questions with a straight face.
It certainly didn’t help that all at once, everyone in the entire school was suddenly interested in him. People he didn’t know would walk up to him and act as if they were buddies. A few minutes later, they would ask about how his parents died.
But he didn’t tell anyone that.
He refused to even think about it.
One of the more memorable moments was when Theseus Nott’s girlfriend walked up to him and casually mentioned that she thought his father was a DILF. Whatever that meant.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Rose said as she stuffed her mouth with some soggy cereal.
You're thinking too loud. It was something his father would say to his mother quite frequently. He used to wear that ‘Malfoy smirk’ that Scorpius never seemed to perfect.
“One of us has to do the thinking,” Scorpius replied just like his mother used to. He didn’t care that it made no sense.
She devoured her cereal quite quickly. He watched as she took spoonful after spoonful until finally lifting the bowl up to slurp the excess milk. He bit his lip to keep himself from laughing at the milk moustache.
He was envious of her. She always lived in the moment. It was as if she knew nothing of the depths of darkness that life had to offer. In a way, it made him bitter that she seemed to have a perfect life.
Come to think of it, almost everyone at Hogwarts asked him about his parents. Scratch that, everyone that he was on speaking terms with asked him about his parents… except Rose.
To be honest, they were never on speaking terms up until his parents died. Their relationship consisted only of academic rivalry, and he genuinely thought that she was a bitch. Professor Longbottom must have really been fucked in the brain two days after he found out about the news to pair him up with Rose. And he realized that perhaps she wasn’t so bad.
Granted, her bitchy side really showed when she stuck Gillyweed in his eye for accidentally dropping their fertilizer a few weeks later. Scorpius, being the kind gentleman he was, returned the favour by throwing a Nose-Hair Growing Hex.
They were not the best of friends and they definitely did not confide in each other. The only thing that they did that might have suggested that they were acquaintances was their Astronomy Tower trips. It was an unspoken and unplanned routine.
It started when Rose once walked in on one of Scorpius’ breakdowns during the start of their Sixth Year; she didn’t say a single word to him. She barely acknowledged the fact that she saw him at his worst. She sat beside him till he calmed down. From then on, every other day, they would meet there.
Most of the time, they both just read. Sometimes they would talk about classes and friends. And maybe those conversations would web into those that bordered philosophy.
Scorpius had no idea at what point his stupid adolescent mind decided that Rose Weasley of all people was the person that he found most attractive. He didn’t know what possessed him when he told his best friend, Albus Potter, about his ‘crush’.
Bad idea.
A couple of weeks back, during their seventh to last day of Hogwarts, Albus literally stood up on top of the Slytherin table during dinner and screamed it at the top of his lungs while a voice amplifying charm was placed on him.
He would have probably been more embarrassed if she brought it up, which she thankfully didn’t.
But he did wonder if deep down she actually wanted to talk to him or if it was all just a pet project of hers. He had a secret theory that she was actually brainwashed by the Department of Mysteries to collect data for a study.
If she was not a pawn and was genuinely interested in being his— whatever they were— she would have at least asked about his parents.
His heart thundered against his chest at the thought of him asking her what her true intentions were. What if it ruined everything? What if she would take it the wrong way and think that he’s desperate for her sympathy. What if that would make her hate him. What if she already hated him? What if she was pretending to be cordial because she felt pity for him— that is if she wasn’t brainwashed by the Department of Mysteries.
“Rose?” Scorpius started, mentally arguing with his heart to calm the fuck down.
“What?”
Oh no, it was too late to turn back now.
“Are you part of a secret Department of Mysteries project that consists of studying the patterns of a grieving depressed boy while experimenting to see what he finds attractive and using that to actually make the boy develop feelings for you?”
Shit. He did not mean to say that.
“Excuse me?” Rose said, confusion illustrated across her face. “Should I be offended?”
“No!” Scorpius said quickly. Why did he care so much about whether or not he offended her? At one point, he aimed to only offend her. “What I meant was, why are you even talking to me?”
“You don’t want me to talk to you?” she asked.
“That’s not what I meant either! I do want you to talk to me—“ He stopped himself from making a greater fool out of himself. “It’s just that most people only seem to interact with me because they want to know what Hermione Malfoy was like or if Draco Malfoy was really as evil as he seemed.”
He watched her face grow even more confused.
“But it seems like you don’t give a flying fuck about who my parents are! You haven’t asked me anything about them at all.”
She looked at him with a calculated expression.
“Would you prefer that I did?” she asked.
That was a good question. He hated it when people asked him about his parents.
But he wanted her to ask him about his parents. He wanted to share it with her. He wanted to tell her how he felt about everything.
She was the only one he ever wanted to tell.
“I was under the impression that you didn’t like it when people pestered you about it,” Rose said, following his silence.
“I hated it,” Scorpius replied. He averted his gaze. “My father used to say that regardless of how painless a wound is, it must be tended to.”
His eyes felt heavy.
“Scorpius—“
“It didn’t hurt at first. I simply didn’t believe it. I thought it was a sick prank that McGonagall was pulling on me. I didn’t even attend the fucking funeral because I knew that they would jump out of their caskets and yell ‘surprise!’ And I didn’t want them to win.”
“Scorpius, you don’t have to—“
“I want to tell you,” he said, meeting her gaze. His eyes stung as he tried to withhold the tears. “I want to tell you as long as you’re okay with listening.”
Rose nodded. She slid her hand towards him and gently placed her palm on top of his hand.
His cheeks hollowed and his heart sunk.
Goosebumps.
It was probably the chilly air.
“I don’t know how to feel, Rose,” he admitted. “At first, when I was actually hurt, I felt numb. It didn’t hurt and I felt like I was a monster. I thought only about myself and how I’d have to live with my Grandfather and Grandmother. When you saw me crying, I wasn’t crying about the fact that my parents were dead. No. I was crying about the fact that my Grandfather wrote a lovely letter outlining how I’m a disgrace to the Malfoy name.
“Now it hurts. It started crashing down on me a few months back. There will be no more embarrassing nicknames that my mother uses for me. There will be no more of my parents rushing to my aid after a small cut.”
Her fingers stroked his palm gently.
“Rose, I just want to move on. I don’t know if I prefer to be hurt or to be numb. I don’t want to live in this constant state of yearning for something that I will never get nor do I want to feel empty. I don’t want to be a monster and I certainly don’t want to be weak.”
“You’re not a monster, Scorpius,” Rose said quietly. “You never were.”
“And you are certain that is the case because?”
“We all have different wounds that should be dealt with differently according to the certain wound,” she said, her eyes on the bowl of soggy cereal. “Just because you needed time to process everything that was going on doesn’t mean that you didn’t care.”
She rapidly blinked, as if she was trying to suppress tears of her own.
“It felt like there was a hole within you, didn’t it?” she said. “It felt as if you needed something to fill that hole because that hole being empty made you feel as though you're missing a part of yourself.” A tear slid down her cheek. “But you knew that as soon as you filled that hole— the moment that you felt an ounce of anything, everything would fall apart. Every single defence you built up within yourself would crumble and shatter and that hole within you would swallow you up like a black hole.”
She chuckled slowly. Her fingers slid into the gaps between his fingers.
“But then that is exactly what happened. And you knew all along that at some point you would be consumed by it.” Rose added.
“Rose?” Is all he said. He didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Was I right?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m doing a Mind Healing apprenticeship at St. Mungo’s. I must know at least that much.” She wiped the tear off of her cheek. “You’re crying by the way.”
He didn’t realize that tears stained his cheeks till he reached for his face and was greeted by a damp patch of skin.
“Now do you want to tell me the truth?” he asked.
“There isn’t anything to really tell you.”
“Rose.”
She shrugged. “This isn’t about me. My wounds have had a decade to heal.”
“It doesn’t seem as though it has healed yet,” Scorpius said.
“That’s because wounds like this never truly heal.” She withdrew her hand that was resting atop his. She pointed to a small white scar near the wrist and traced her finger over it. “This here, it’s healed. It’s no longer bleeding. But there’s still a scar. A reminder of what happened.” She gave him a pained smile.
“But our minds don’t work that way,” she continued. “They try to heal themselves, and you truly do believe that you're done hurting. The mind has no scars, unfortunately. It just has wounds that try to heal themselves with scabbing that can easily be picked away.”
Scorpius wondered if her seemingly perfect life was in reality not so perfect.
“You’re telling me that this wound is a cut that always bleeds?” he asked.
She nodded. “But it does get better as you learn to know what it needs to try and rebuild the scabbing.”
“What do I do to make it stop bleeding?”
“It depends on the person,” Rose replied. “Different people have different coping methods.”
“What helped you deal with your wound?” Scorpius asked.
She pressed her lips together and looked up into the sky.
“The time I spent with you.”
~