Author's Notes: I felt like doing another story about the Next Gen Malfoy family, apparently.

The last two scenes tie in to my story "Sorting Things Out," but should be able to be read alone without any problem. I hope you enjoy!

Draco hadn't realized how much it hurt to get the Dark Mark.

Even years later he could remember the scene: the room was dimly lit, the curtains were drawn and there, sitting calmly in his father's own chair, was the Dark Lord, a figure of his fantasies looking strange and surreal in the flesh. Draco had entered and knelt down, with his mother and Aunt Bellatrix behind him. The Dark Lord had explained the task he had for Draco, and Draco had accepted, even though his voice trembled and his heart raced as he wondered how, exactly, he could ever hope to complete it. But scared though he was, he truly wanted that honor, and his father's imprisonment in Azkaban only drove him harder to follow in his footsteps.

He hadn't understood what this all meant; not really. He thought he understood, he knew and accepted all of the Death Eater creeds, but even as much as he hated Mudbloods, at that moment he had mostly just wanted to regain his father's honor. He loved his father, and would have done anything to make him happy.

The Dark Lord told him to rise, and Draco had extended his arm, trying and failing to keep it from shaking. The Dark Lord had run one long finger down his skin almost lovingly, and Draco had had to fight the urge to pull away. He caught sight of his mother behind him, looking like she was about to cry, and his aunt looking enraptured, almost indecent, as though it was her own arm that the Dark Lord was caressing. Finally he pressed his wand against Draco's flesh, turning his head as if the pale skin of his forearm were some sort of curiosity.

"Morsmordre visci!"

Draco had told himself that he would remain dignified, but he could not help from crying out in pain as his arm burned like fire, then turned so cold that it seemed to burn even worse. It remained aching for hours, and as he stared at the Mark now burnt permanently in his flesh he wondered if the pain was supposed to be equally eternal. It faded eventually, but never for long. The first night at Hogwarts it burned so badly he had awoken in the night; another time Professor McGonagall had asked if he needed to go to the Infirmary when he cried out in the middle of class.

Draco knew that the Dark Lord was calling his servants, and he knew that he was exempt from those meetings—he couldn't have Apparated there anyway—but every time the Mark burned he became jittery and tense. It was a reminder that the Dark Lord was connected to him, that he was expecting results from him, and soon he came to hate that horrid Mark, no longer a badge of honor but a symbol of how much the Dark Lord delighted in torturing his family.

It kept burning, off and on, for almost two years, until the Dark Lord finally fell. And then, quite suddenly, it faded—it no longer burned, it was no longer thick and black on his flesh, but dulled to a thin, faint pink, like an old scar.

But it was still there.

The Aurors who showed up after the Battle of Hogwarts saw it, on both Draco and his father. They forced him to show it at the Wizengamot, and it was only through begging and giving names and testimony from Potter of all people that they managed to avoid time in Azkaban. It gave everyone undeniable proof of what he had been—not an innocent bystander, not a bewitched slave, but a Death Eater, an idiot who had willingly given his life over to the Dark Lord. Sometimes people would hear his last name or just recognize his face and demand that he show them his arm, kicking him out of stores or social functions if he refused.

Draco had come to hate the Dark Lord, and deep down he hated himself for ever thinking he could wear his insignia with pride.

But it didn't matter. His error was still there, branded onto his flesh forever.

He was Marked.

Things got better over the years. His father was basically ruined—he had sided with the Dark Lord during both wars, after all—but people...most people, anyway...were willing to forgive Draco, as long as he kept his head down and just ran his family business in peace. Not that it stopped some people from harassing him, making snide comments, giving pointed looks to his sleeve where they knew the Mark was hidden...

He still hated looking at it. Sometimes he would hold up both arms and compare them, one smooth and clear, the other scarred and twisted and evil-looking. The Dark Mark's eyes seemed to mock him, daring him to say that he'd changed while it was still there testifying to his past mistakes.

Everyone knew that the Dark Mark was permanent, but that didn't stop Draco from doing everything he could to get rid of it. He tried Healers, potions, concealment spells, but nothing worked, at least not permanently. Some people had used Transfiguration to make it go away, but the Mark's magic was so deep that it always reappeared unless the spells were reapplied almost constantly.

"It didn't work," Draco said dully, gazing at his arm.

"Are you sure?" Asteria said, staring. "I don't..."

Draco traced it with his finger. "It's faint, but it's reappearing."

His voice was so worn, and his face was dull and defeated. Asteria put her hand on his cheek and steered his gaze toward her, meeting his eyes.

"You know, the people who still care about this aren't going to stop just because you make the Mark go away. And the people who matter don't care." She put her other hand over the Mark, and he winced. "You know I don't."

Draco turned. "Maybe you should," he muttered.

Just then their house-elf, Tilly, came into the kitchen, humming to herself and holding the hand of two-year-old Scorpius. Draco let out a hiss and immediately pulled up his sleeve, concealing the barely-visible lines on his arm. The sudden motion drew Scorpius' eye, but he simply regarded his father curiously for a moment before toddling over to his mum and pointing to the cookie jar on the counter.

It was two years later when Draco woke up in his armchair, blinking blearily, one arm draping down toward the floor while the other lay over the crinkled Daily Prophet on his chest.

He had fallen asleep watching Scorpius, hadn't he? That was stupid, especially with Asteria and Tilly both out of the house—he quickly sat up and looked around, but Scorpius was sitting right there next to his chair, a collection of colored children's quills by his side. Draco sighed. He started to get up, pushing the newspaper off of his body, and then paused.

Shaking back his sleeves, Draco saw that his left arm was now covered in bright, colorful ink. Scorpius had apparently taken advantage of his catnap to trace the length of each vein visible through his skin, color in the slight wrinkles of his wrist, and doodle random signs and letters down near his elbows.

But what mainly drew Draco's eye was the Dark Mark, now shakily outlined in bright emerald ink.

For a moment Draco could only stare at it, feeling as though something had obstructed his throat. "Scor—Scorpius?"

He looked down at his son, and Scorpius looked up, and that's when he noticed a far, far more horrifying sight.

Scorpius had drawn all over his own arm, and drawn his own Dark Mark in the process.

It was on his right arm—Scorpius was left-handed—and it was purple, and it was in no way as clear or distinct as the one that he had had traced on his father. The skull looked more like a formless blob, and the snake was just a twisted line emerging from the circle of its mouth, but it was still there, and it was still obvious what Scorpius had been trying to imitate. Draco began to tremble, and Scorpius turned to him and smiled, only for that smile to falter when he looked at Daddy's face and saw his eyes bulging and his lip trembling and his cheeks turning red with fury.

"SCORPIUS!"

Something in Draco's brain had snapped, and the next thing he knew he had grabbed his son by his ruined arm and dragged him, stumbling, into the kitchen. Scorpius tried to stammer out a question but Draco ignored him, immediately Summoning a chair for him to stand on as he got to work cleaning his arm in the sink. The boy cried out as his father turned on the water as hot as possible and scrubbed his arm until it was raw, hissing with fury as the blasted ink would not come off all the way. He even tried to pour on some of the All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover from under the sink, only for Scorpius to start sobbing that it was burning him. Finally Draco gave up and leaned against the counter, panting, as Scorpius whimpered and held his right arm protectively, the faint lines he had drawn still visible through his left fingers.

"I'm sorry, Daddy...I'm sorry..."

Draco looked over at his son crying and suddenly felt disgusted with himself. He picked up his wand with trembling fingers, motioning for Scorpius to let him see his arm. "No, it's alright, Scorpius...Daddy will make it better..."

Scorpius held out his arm only reluctantly. Draco took his son's hand, waved his wand and muttered out a few healing spells. The raw redness on Scorpius' arm quickly faded back to pale white, though the ink marks remained. "Is that better?" Draco murmured, not quite able to look his son in the face.

Scorpius sniffled. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I didn't—"

Draco sighed, putting his wand in his pocket. He forced himself to look his son in the eye. "No, I'm sorry," he said, and his voice was still shaking. "I—should not have gotten that angry at you. But Scorpius? Listen to me. This is very important."

Scorpius stared at his father, still looking frightened. Draco pointed at the makeshift Dark Mark on his arm, and Scorpius' eyes followed.

"Do you see this picture? Not—not these blue lines, but this picture, here? The one—" He hesitated, then pulled out his own arm. He had not even bothered trying to wash his own Dark Mark, letting its ink shine brightly on his flesh. "The one that Daddy has on his arm?"

Scorpius nodded slowly. "Y-Yeah?"

"That's a bad picture. You don't want that on your arm. It will make people think you're a bad person."

"B-But—I d-didn't mean to be bad."

Draco's face fell. Like most parents he often thought that his child must be the more beautiful thing in the entire world, and the look of shame on his son's face was almost heartbreaking. "You didn't do anything bad, Scorpius. That's my point. You're far too good to have something like this on your arm. Do you understand me?"

Scorpius didn't, not really, but he understood that the picture he had drawn was Bad and that drawing on his arm would Make Daddy Angry so he nodded. Then he looked down at his arm with the lines of ink still visible and his lip trembled. "But it's still there!" he said miserably.

Draco sighed. It was stained on by now; he didn't know of any spell that could remove it. "It's alright, son. It will go away in a few days."

For the next week Draco checked Scorpius' arm almost obsessively, two or three times a day, feeling like he would not be able to rest secure until the horrible little doodle had finally vanished. He was faintly terrified of it—he even wanted to cancel a pre-scheduled day-trip to Diagon Alley just on the off-chance that someone might notice it. He finally conceded as long as Scorpius wore a Muggle shirt with close-fitting sleeves under his robe. "We just—don't want anyone to see your arm and think that you're suppose to have a pictures like that," he explained, trying to arrange Scorpius' clothes so that they looked less ridiculous.

"Honestly, Draco, you're being paranoid," Asteria sighed. "I don't think I even would have known what that picture was supposed to be if you hadn't told me."

Draco felt his cheeks burn. "I know, dearest. But..."

He trailed off, because he didn't quite know what he wanted to say. What if somebody did see it and did realize what it was supposed to be? What if they thought that they were indifferent to their son drawing something like that, or worse, that they even encouraged it? Draco could hardly imagine a parent doing something like that...at least, not these days. The very thought kept making him remember his mother and Aunt Bellatrix's faces when he received his own Mark, and then he would wonder, with his stomach twisting, whether or not his father would have minded something like this when he was a child...

Finally, after a week, Scorpius' Dark Mark was gone. At least, it seemed to be—Draco knew it was crazy, but he could almost swear that he still saw it, some faint traces of...but no. It was gone, finally.

Draco held Scorpius' two arms together, comparing them, feeling a great weight lift from his shoulders. Without thinking Draco bent down and kissed his son's right arm, as if the faded symbol were an injury that needed to be soothed. "There, you see? Doesn't that look better now?"

"Uh-huh," Scorpius said mechanically.

"Now...do not do anything like that again. You draw on parchment, not people, and...you shouldn't draw that particular picture at all. Understand?"

"Okay." Then he suddenly met his father's eye. "What about yours?"

"Wh—What?"

Scorpius pushed back his father's sleeve. The ink Scorpius had drawn was mostly faded, but the Dark Mark was still there, as twisted and terrible as it had been since the Dark Lord fell. He pointed at it. "My picture went away. Why didn't yours?"

"Well, it—" Draco rubbed his arm for a moment, looking away. "Mine wasn't made with quills, Scorpius. It was put there by magic. Dark magic. It's...permanent."

"You mean it won't ever go away? You're gonna have the bad picture forever?"

Draco's eyes were on the floor. "Yes."

"Oh." For a moment Scorpius stared at his father. Then he suddenly bent down and, to Draco's surprise and horror, kissed the Dark Mark, the same way that Draco had kissed his clean skin a minute before.

He didn't understand what that meant; not really. He didn't understand how it looked to kiss the symbol of the most evil wizard of the last century, because at that moment he just wanted to make his father feel better. He loved his father, and would have done anything to make him happy.

Draco felt like he was going to be sick.

Eventually Scorpius began to understand what his father had done as a young man and why he had that Mark branded on his arm. He didn't like to think about it, however, and Draco didn't like to answer questions about it, so the subject was rarely broached except by vague allusions or whispered comments. It was not until Scorpius went off to Hogwarts that the two began to discuss the topic with something close to frankness.

"So," his father said as the two sat by the fire in the drawing home, on Scorpius' first full day home for Christmas holiday. "Your are...enjoying Gryffindor House better now than at the beginning of the year?"

"Yes, Father. I mean—that Blishwick boy and his friends still cause me a bit of trouble, but they do that to nearly everyone anyway. But I have a lot of friends now. In Gryffindor and the other Houses."

"Hmm." Draco took a slow sip of his wine. "And these friends know about...our family? And our...history?"

He waved his hand vaguely, then flinched and put his arm down as his sleeve drew back an inch. Scorpius stared down into his goblet of butterbeer.

"They all do, to some extent."

"And they do not seem to mind?"

Scorpius hesitated. "Most people did seem...wary around me at first. But just about everyone realizes that I—we—aren't like that."

There was a long pause, and Scorpius went back to staring into his butterbeer again. He was not quite sure how he felt about this conversation. On the one hand, he appreciated this new-found sense of candor, and it gave him a strange sort of pride—he was only twelve, yet here he sat in the big, fancy armchair where his father usually entertained business associates, talking about issues that seemed very adult. At the same time he felt small and uncomfortable. He did not like to think about his father's past—it was strange and unsettling to imagine his father as a Death Eater, so far removed was it from the man he had grown up with.

Draco broke the silence. "I am not sure I have taken the chance to apologize to you, Scorpius." Now it was his turn to stare into his drink, stirring it in his hand. "I did not realize how much of a bad legacy my...youthful indiscretions were going to leave you with. I'm sorry for that."

Scorpius stared at him in surprise. "Um...that's alright, Father," he said awkwardly. "It's not like you could have done anything to stop it."

"Hmm," Draco said, as if he contested that point. "Well. Tell me about these friends of yours. You've mentioned at least a few of them in your letters, but I would like to hear more."

Scorpius nodded. "Of course." He paused to organize his thoughts, then began to recount his closest friends—Albus from Hufflepuff, Anita from Slytherin, and Nilus from his own House. "That reminds me," he said suddenly. "I meant to ask yesterday—can Nilus come and spend Christmas with us this year? They don't celebrate it, so he doesn't think his parents will mind."

Draco arched an eyebrow and thought for a moment. "I will have to talk to your mother, but if she and Nilus' parents are alright with it, I suppose that's fine."

"Thank you, Father," Scorpius said, and he smiled.

Draco hesitated for a moment, then asked "What sort of family is Nilus from, exactly?"

Scorpius flinched. "Um...he's a half-blood, I think. Does that matter?"

Draco saw the trepidation on his son's face and quickly looked back at his wine. "No—of course not. Just—idle curiosity."

"Of course," Scorpius said again, looking away. He felt even less comfortable now. He wondered what his father would think if he knew that Anita, despite being a Slytherin, was actually a Muggle-born—let alone that Albus, despite being (arguably) a Pureblood, was the son of Harry Potter.

A few days later Scorpius trudged down the stairs, paused at the doorway to the kitchen and straightened his back, trying to force a casual look onto his face.

Tilly was singing to herself as she made pudding, and his mum and dad were sitting at the table with a collection of Christmas cards. "Oh, Scorpius, we just needed to talk to you," his mother said. "Is your friend coming over tomorrow or the next night?"

"Er, neither," Scorpius said, looking over Tilly's shoulder so that they would not be able to see his face. "He can't come after all."

"That's too bad," his mother said. "What happened?"

He shrugged. "It just turned out that his parents were less keen on the idea than he expected."

There was a certain tightness in his voice that made Draco look up. Scorpius was still facing away, watching Tilly bake. He frowned.

"Son, is everything alright?"

Scorpius finally turned. "Yes, Father. Everything's fine."

His face was so casual and his tone so even that Draco suspected he had been imagining things. "Alright, then," he said, looking back down at the work Asteria was forcing him to do. "This might be for the best. You boys would probably enjoy yourselves more at a less hectic time of year."

"You may have a point." He cleared his throat, hesitated, and then said nothing before leaving the kitchen and heading back to his bedroom.

Scorpius slammed the door a bit harder than he had intended and threw himself on his bed. A slight crinkling noise revealed that he had lain right on Nilus' letter, and he pulled it out from behind his back, staring hard at the words again. His eyes settled on one paragraph near the end.

"...sort of went ballistic. I'm really sorry; I wish I could still come. I mean, I don't care, and I'M sure your dad is a perfectly nice bloke, but when MY PARENTS found out he used to be a Death Eater—"

Scorpius growled and crumpled the letter into a ball, throwing it carelessly toward the bin and missing by almost two feet. He stared up at his ceiling and stewed for several long minutes, feeling his heart hammer in his chest.

Part of him wanted to go and tell Nilus fine, the Malfoys don't want you in our house anyway, and as soon as we get back to school you can consider our friendship over, you traitor. A larger, more reasonable part of him knew that that wasn't fair, because Nilus really didn't care about the family's sordid history. He had known it since the two of them met, but it didn't stop him from befriending Scorpius or making the initial plans to come over. He couldn't punish Nilus just because of his parents.

He went to his desk and wrote a quick note, far more terse than he usually was in a letter.

Dear Nilus,

I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you have a good time at Elijah's instead. Thank you for the present; I'll give you yours in January.

—Scorpius

He tied it to his owl's leg and practically threw her out the window, then went back to lying moodily on his bed.

He wondered, vaguely, if there was anything that he could do to convince Nilus' parents that the family weren't a bunch of Death Eaters trying to lure their precious son to his doom. Then he wondered, quite suddenly, if their refusal was even related to anything he could do, or what they thought about the family. After all, it was only Scorpius' father who had been a Death Eater.

Scorpius suddenly wanted to know what, exactly, Nilus' parents had said to him. Had they told Nilus not to associate with Scorpius anymore, or merely that he could not stay in the same house as his father? Would they have objected if the plan had been for Scorpius to come over to their house?

He supposed it didn't really matter. Their plans were ruined either way. But still...

After a moment Scorpius raised his arms, shaking back his right sleeve. Then he put his left index finger to his pale skin, slowly tracing a long-remembered shape.

He knew it was crazy, but sometimes he could almost swear that he still saw it, some faint traces of that misshapen Mark that he had scribbled all those years ago...