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baby draco is having some growing pains
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Malfoy Manor is a paradise, iff it wants you there. 

It's an old manor, see. The oldest, in fact: there's older buildings in Britain, such as Hogwarts, and older places, like the hill the Ollivanders live under, but there's not really older houses.(1) It's had dozens of generations of Malfoys live in it, in unbroken line from Armand, advisor to the Conqueror, and many of them deliberately improved the enchantments and wards, but some of them just lived there their whole lives, and that does some magic all its own. When you are the master of a house like this, you never trip down the stairs, the reference book you were looking for is always right to hand, the sun always shines just right through the windows to highlight your best features when you want to impress someone. 

When you're the child of such a house, not yet its master, the conveniences are less insistently helpful (though the elves usually aren't), but the sense of belonging is not. The house wants you to love it, like a not quite animate stuffed animal auditioning for a spot on the permanent shelf instead of relegated to the nostalgia of youth. The flowers in the garden are always in view and never underfoot unless you want to walk through them; the fireplace is always the right temperature in your bedroom; the walking paths are all manageable distance for little legs, and the hedgerows are as impassible as forty-foot stone to wild animals that might even consider being less friendly than a decorative sparrow. The great white peacocks(2) strut about the gardens, rightly confident that no wolf has been permitted upon the grounds since approximately five minutes after Armand's wife Cateline raised the walls. 

This ... mostly ... works, if your father is disappointed in you, so long as he hasn't actually disowned you yet. 

You can kind of feel it, though. 


(1) Grimmauld Place, nominative determinism notwithstanding, was built in the 18th century. Why can't anyone remember where the Black family lived before that? Don't worry about it! :)

(2) A creature roughly the size of an especially large ostrich; there's always somewhere between five and twenty of them, and this number is more or less uncorrelated to how many of them have been served for dinner recently. If you ask the kitchen elves how this works they will look at you rather like you just asked why the number of rain clouds there have been this year isn't related to the water pressure in the shower.  

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But anyway.

A house-elf appears, as it always does, with meticulously embroidered tea towel and floppy ears, at the foot of Draco's bed. It's always the same one, because only one of them is brave enough to constantly suffer the indignity of being blamed for the young master not being perfect at everything yet, on account of he is six. 

"Good morning! I am bringing milk and biscuits and bacon!" trills Dobby. "It is being Saturday! No tutors for Master Draco! What is we doing today?" 

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"Good morning!"

Draco sits up and reaches for the bacon. His hand is halfway to his mouth when he remembers that bacon is not a finger food. He sets it back down and licks the grease off his fingers before picking up a fork.

"Weeee… could look for interesting beetles in the gardens, or go say hello to great-great-great-grandmother's portrait, or make potions?"

Potions, of course, being anything ingredients-like Draco can find and mix together in a stockpot pilfered from the kitchens.

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Well. Hm. 

Beetles potential upside: Gardens pretty; beetles objectively neat. Potential downside: Probably Undignified(TM). Portrait potential upside: Responsible family-oriented behavior; floating Draco to portrait height adorable. Potential downside: We are not incredible at not offending the portrait. Potions potential upside: Invariably hilarious; sometimes seen as acceptable future-actual-potioneer behavior. Potential downside: Sometimes they explode. 

"...Master Draco is of course choosing whatever he would like but Dobby thinks it is good weather for finding beetles?" 

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"Hooray!"

Draco finishes up, dipping the biscuits in the milk.

"Maybe we can make beetle potions after, and show them to great-great-great-grandmother!"

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Well that sounds. Adorable. The fact that it is also probably incredibly fraught is a problem for future Dobby. 

To the gardens!  

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The gardens of Malfoy Manor brim with magical plant life, curated very strictly into lovely orderly rectangles and decorated with only the most attractive and non-annoying of insects, and perfectly harmless (at least if you are Draco; someone who snuck in from outside intending harm to any of the inhabitants would find that the rectangles no longer have nice paths between them, and have rather a lot of grasping vines). As far as wizards are concerned, mosquitos and rose thorns, much like weather and laundry, are problems for poor people. 

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It's fine, because future Dobby and future Draco don't exist yet!

"We should find as many different colors as we can," he says decisively. "And… um… kinds!"

He likes the gardens very much. The concept of intruders is theoretical at best to him, as is the concept of impolite gardens.

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Dobby has no knowledge of what makes a beetle a different Kind but house-elves have great color vision, as one of their core functions is portrait maintenance, so he'll be able to catch a few (the garden is polite to the elves, too, but more in the cooperative manner of a colleague; it doesn't get in the way while he's trying to follow an instruction but it doesn't really help the way it gently nudges interesting beetles Draco's way when he expresses a desire for them), gently plucking them out of tall bushes with his knobbly fingers and presenting them to Draco as ceremoniously as cups of tea. 

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Magical garden beetles range from the merely colorful to the actively bioluminescent, though the latter are mostly hiding under rocks at this hour. The feathered finch-beetles are out in force, though, now that the sun's up, chittering happily to each other and congregating around the lavender scarves (a sort of weeping willow-like treebush whose long purple arms wave gently in the breeze regardless of the actual air currents around them and are traditionally used for wedding arches).  

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(The word he was looking for was "patterns," but he's also excited to see different wing shapes or levels of shininess or similar.)

He holds as many beetles in his hands as he can, giggling when they crawl ticklishly over his skin. The swaying of the lavender scarves distracts him eventually.

"Do they keep waving like that if you take the branches off?"

He reaches out to try and test this theory.

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He eyes the beetles, which will disappear in a snap of elf fingers if they threaten to bite instead of being cute and crawly, and then squints at the tree. "Dobby does not know?" he admits, instinctively preflinching a little and then remembering that Draco has had quite delayed development in the traditional malfoyite field of doing violence to insufficiently helpful elves. 

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The tree will politely relinquish a not-very-firmly-attached dry branch. They do seem to keep moving a bit, but it's idle wobbling, very small movements, like they're waiting. 

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"Hmmm, only a little!" diagnoses Draco. "Do you think it gets used to make purple paint, because it moves a little?"

He bends the branch to see if it tries to spring back into its original shape.

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