Harry Potter Oneshots I Wrote Instead Of Doing More Important Things

Alone- Draco Malfoy

I spent most of my childhood with my mother. Just her and I. The manor, although lavish, was awfully lonely for a little boy. Through boredom, and only the purest form of adoration, I often found myself clinging to her side as she went about her day.

There were more mundane, drawn-out days than not at the manor. We didn't need to do anything. And so sometimes there was nothing to do.

House-elves did the cooking and the cleaning. My mother only ever tended to the garden. Otherwise, she spent a lot of time in the family library alone.

The high-vaulted room was always a marvel for young eyes. The bookshelves, perhaps four or five times my height, towered like giants upon the black-clad walls. In the centre of all was somehow the most marvellous of black-marble fireplaces.

•-•

"This is a rose," Mother said, her index finger extended to a large, eloquent-looking white flower on the mantlepiece.

I, only eight or so, looked up in boyish awe. "Like in the garden?" I asked.

She nodded. "Exactly like in the garden."

•-•

"Do you know what a rose symbolises, Draco?" he asked, plucking the flower from its vase.

I shook my head.

"Beauty, love, courage..." She listed, slowly pacing along the mantel. "And most importantly, secrecy."

She placed the rose in the middle of a coiled snake statue. Almost immediately, its innocent, white petals began to turn grey, as if being charred by flames. The flower sat there, smouldering and black with coal dust, before it began to spit petals that drifted like hand gliders onto the snake's upward-facing head.

And suddenly, the fireplace began to rise, and rise, and rise, until it revealed a dark passageway that seemed to stretch into oblivion.

"If I could teach you one thing my dearest," My mother spoke. I took my place behind her. I was staring into the pitch black, slightly scared by its unknown.

"Not everything is as it seems in this world... Sometimes, you only see what they want you to see."

I never asked who they were at that time. But when she led me, my hand in hers, into a room filled with a thousand more books, each titles names I've hever heard of in my life, I thought, perhaps, I understood what she meant.

•-•

M

uggle books.

From Dickens to Hemingway, the Brontë, Jane Austin, Virginia Woolf, Wordsworth...

My mother had a collection of books that no dark-lord-fearing woman should possess.

Yet I loved it.

"Read me one! Read me one!" I pleaded. She smiled, extending her hand to the shelf and pulled one out.

"Go sit down," She commanded gently. I almost ran to the nearest leather sofa. She perched herself down next to me, her hand running over the spine of a small red book.

And then she began to read. And I listened intently for hours...

"Yet here's a spot." She articulated. I gripped the corner of the blanket she'd draped over me. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?- Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him...