A Veela's Mate || Draco Malfoy

Sᴏᴍᴇᴏɴᴇ Is Hᴀᴠɪɴɢ A Bᴀᴅ Dᴀʏ

Arthur Weasley looked up from his cup of tea when the owl carrying his copy of the Daily Prophet came flying through the window. Relieving the bird of its burden, and dropping the required Knuts into the little pouch tied to a bony leg, the Weasley patriarch lost all interest in the owl as he unfolded the paper and opened it. Picking up his cup, he promptly choked on it as his glance took in the headlines.

"Arthur, dear, are you alright?" Molly asked her husband, walking over to his chair from the stove and beginning to pound on his back.

"I'm fine, dear," Arthur gasped, attempting to shift away from his wife's enthusiastic pounding.

Molly didn't hear him. Her eyes were glued to the front page of the Daily Prophet, and she gasped in outrage. Snatching the paper from her husband, she began to read the article, muttering parts of it aloud.

"How dare she?" she cried, brandishing the paper in her outrage. "How dare she! How dare Iris put the blame for what happened that summer on Percy? Yes, yes," she added irritably when her husband tried to get a word in, "Percy has sided with the Ministry, and he has said a few not so flattering things about Iris, but that doesn't give Iris the right to badmouth my boy! Percy would never do anything to harm his family, and until recently Iris Potter was family. I can't believe how badly that girl turned out, but what did you expect? With Sirius Black as her godfather? Remus is a dear, but he isn't exactly a good role model for a child to have either, and poor Iris attached herself to the two of them. She should have taken Percy as her role model instead. I should have known though, when I found out she had helped the twins with that appalling shop of theirs."

"Now, Molly, you know very well that Iris hasn't turned dark. As for Percy, he is not the model of good behavior that you tend to paint him. He is a stuck up prick, refusing to see the evidence staring him in the face. He is blinded by ambition; it was only a matter of time before that ambition placed him in hot water," Arthur said, tired of the way his wife refused to see what Percy was really like.

"How dare you! Percy is our son!"

"Is that why you have been painting Iris Potter blacker than black? In an attempt to muddle the waters so no one in the Order would realize what type of person Percival really is? You used to adore Iris, Molly, what happened?"

"What happened? What happened? She got a student killed, Arthur! She got poor Cedric killed by You Know Who! Was I just to stand back and wait for her to get our children killed too? Just look at the mess she caused at the Department of Mysteries! She was lured into a trap, and she took. My. Children. With. Her!" Molly shrieked, getting red in the face with her fury.

Arthur shook his head sadly. "When are you going to realize that the children are growing up? When will you acknowledge that they no longer are babies, but adults with a mind of their own? Iris didn't force them to come with her to the Ministry, they chose to follow her. If you go on treating them the way you are, Percy isn't the only of our children that will turn their backs on you."

"How. Dare. You!" Molly whispered, too shocked to get her vocal cords to work properly.

"How dare I?" Arthur asked mockingly. "How dare you! For years you have placed Percy on some sort of pedestal, holding him up to the other children as a paragon of model behavior . Just because he wasn't playing pranks on people, and because he was getting good grades, you turned a blind eye to his less pleasant qualities. Open your eyes, Molly, before it is too late. The other children never could stand their brother; did you ever consider that maybe they had a reason? Merlin knows I've done my best to treat all of my children equally, can you say the same?

"As for Iris. You agreed to take her in and treat her as one of your own. You went back on that promise, and I can't tell you how ashamed of you I am for that. I know, I should have put my foot down a long time ago, but I was weak. I wanted to keep the peace within the family, and look at us now. Bill and Charlie moved halfway across the world to get away from us. Percy is refusing to even talk to us, and I'm guessing it won't be long before the twins move away as well, considering how well they are doing with their business. You should be proud of them, and yet you belittle them at every turn. They have made something of themselves, and for some reason you refuse to see that. I can't help but wonder why. Are you jealous of them?