His mother used to paint. Watercolors: and he would watch her at work, delicate daubs of pale color forming petals on a flower, the blush on an apple, a wash of blue across a windswept sky. Her paintings were never hung anywhere visible, but lined the walls of the airy room she'd used as a studio, stacked in corners, and it is only now, years later, that he's thought to revisit them at all. Over her protests - for when are the artistic dabblings of a proper pureblood wife considered anything but the mildest affectation, a way of passing time to be spoken of only lightly and then forgotten? But Draco remembers now, he remembers those days of childhood, of watching her form pictures from the small tubs and tubes of pigment; and in the uncertainty of a too-abrupt adulthood, he finds himself reaching for any trace of comfort that might be found in the memories of his youth.
He gazes around at the walls, hung heavy with canvases, as reverently as if the room were a sacred chapel; he flips through the stacks of canvases, perusing each one carefully, pausing to pull aside any which catch at his heart and tug at him there. A bird, portrayed in a flutter and flurry of quick, abstract strokes - lilies-of-the-valley, newly-risen from a patch of snowclad earth - a young girl-woman of uncertain provenance, perhaps Narcissa herself, mid-whirl on a dance floor, a graceful swirl of dress robes and loose blonde hair. And then, there, toward the back, unexpected treasure: a quick study of a lean-bodied man holding a blanket-swathed infant, gazing at the child in his arms with an expression that manages, even in its few swiftly-painted lines, to be inscrutable and awestruck at once.
Draco holds this portrait before himself and studies it, humbled by the display of skill in portraying so acutely this scene he'd never known or even imagined; and he wonders if he looked this way, when first he held his own infant son in his arms.
In the end, he takes them all along with him to the fine new home in Essex - the bird, the lilies-of-the-valley, the dancer, the portrayal of his father and himself, and others; more, in the end, than he can carry - spurning the ancestral portraits which would be more proper to display, the stern visages of Malfoys and Blacks which had glowered down upon Draco in his own youth. He is a Malfoy, and a Black, and an adult, and an heir; but in the end, Draco decides, he will gaze by choice upon his mother's artistry, and know for just awhile longer that remnant of his youth, so that his Scorpius may also grow up bathed in that delicate wash of color, of movement captured, swiftly and silently as a memory of a dream.
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sad
tired
cranky
accomplished
delighted
