Secrets and Snakes - A Draco Malfoy Story

O' Children

Astoria Greengrass fell in love with Draco Malfoy when she was six years old.

It wasn't a real love, not really. It wasn't the kind they would write poems or books about. But it was a special love, the love of a little girl falling in love with the boy who looked at her like she was the most wondrous thing in the world.

Her childhood was a complicated one, filled with dizzy afternoons, hospital rooms, healers, fainting spells, doctors, and chest pain. When they finally figured out what was wrong with her—and there was something wrong with her—she was a changed girl. She couldn't run around like her sister, Daphne, she had a newfound appreciation for muggles through her experience with their gifted doctors, and she had learned, very quickly, that she was already a burden to her parents.

They would never say that, of course. And she knew that they loved her. But she could tell over the years how difficult her various medical visits were, how exhausting it was having to explain to their prestigious pureblood friends why their daughter was just a little bit different from the others. They began to send her away for periods at a time. They said it was so she could learn how to be a respectable lady from her grandmother, lessons that Daphne would never have to endure. But she knew it was so they could have a few days where they pretended like they didn't have a daughter who wasn't normal.

She hadn't always been like this. Well, that was a lie. She was born like this but she hadn't always known that she was like this. The chest pains started when she was just three years old. Daphne, who was just a year older than her, loved to run around in the gardens. She was considered "one of the guys" by all of the little pureblood boys who came over to play. But her sister was so little when she found that running hurt the spot in the middle of her chest. And one day when she ran too hard, struggling to keep up with Daphne and the other children, she fainted in the middle of the hedges. Her sister found her there and cried out to her parents.

The next day, Astoria woke at Saint Mungo's.

She spent several months there in the warm, chaotic rooms of Saint Mungo's, most of them alone. Her parents had too much to do at home and, besides, they had Daphne to take care of. Sometimes, her grandmother would visit, though that wasn't often. In the end, Saint Mungo's sent her home without a single diagnosis. Something was wrong, they reckoned, but they didn't know what. It was something she was born with, not made of magic, and so they didn't know.

A few weeks later, after another fainting spell, Astoria's parents snuck her out to a muggle hospital. Though she was becoming a bit of a burden—an embarrassing one at that—they couldn't allow their youngest daughter to continue on like this. So, despite their best judgment, they brought Astoria to a children's hospital in London. They surrendered her to the muggles, who finally figured out what was wrong with their daughter.

Astoria didn't remember much from her days at the children's hospital. There were coloring sheets filled with many animals, little chocolate puddings with sprinkles on top at mealtimes, and an elderly man who volunteered to read with her when she was alone at night. But Astoria remembered the day her diagnosis came back very clearly. Arrhythmia, they said, and tachycardia. Her heart beat too fast and too irregularly. With just a small daily pill and a change in lifestyle, Astoria would be fine. She couldn't do much exercise—her arrhythmia was too severe for a child to do that—and she couldn't succumb to undue stress but otherwise, she could go on to Hogwarts and live a normal life.

The diagnosis was both a relief and a stressor for her family. On the one hand, their darling daughter would be fine. On the other, she would never be quite normal. They couldn't tell anyone, that was clear. Otherwise, people would find out that they interacted with muggles—who Astoria thought were actually quite nice—and the shame of having an abnormal daughter would befall the whole family. No, this secret must be kept hidden.