Of Waltzes and Oom-Pahs
I wrote a ficlet today about the chicken dance. Wtf. Better than lice, I guess.
The Potter-Malfoy children learn a new dance, and they can't wait to show Lucius and Narcissa.
This is for @callingdrarry, who created the verse. Read it here or on ao3.
“Can I please bring a video camera?” Harry asked with equal parts excitement and horror.
Draco, who was sitting in an armchair with his hand covering his face in resignation, sighed. “No you may not. This is going to be bad enough without you intentionally prodding them.”
James and Scorpia, dressed in their Fancy Manor Clothes, shouted, “NA NA NA NA NA NA NA!” with linked elbows and spun each other around in circles. Again.
*
When the Potter-Malfoy family tumbled out of the Floo into the Manor (and they did tumble: James ended up in some sort of somersault and Scorpia pulled Harry down into a tangle of limbs on the marble floor—only Draco managed to stay upright, his family strewn around him as if in a metaphor for the state of his Malfoyness), they met a disapproving house-elf.
“Master Lucius and Mistress Narcissa is waiting in the guest drawing room,” Tipsy announced.
“Thank you, Tipsy,” Draco said, taking a breath and arranging his face into its Manor-worthy facade.
The elf disappeared, and Draco immediately held up a hand at Harry, who had a crinkle at his eyes that indicated imminent joking. “Don’t,” Draco warned.
“Don’t what?” Harry asked innocently.
“Don’t make a joke about how you wish you were Tipsy.”
“I would never!” Harry objected with a fair bit of hyperbole, as he made that joke every single time they visited.
“It’s culturally insensitive,” Draco claimed, reaching out a hand to try to keep James in one place as he raised a teasing eyebrow at Harry. “You mustn’t let another species’ naming practices be the butt of your joke. I’m going to tell Hermione.”
“House-elves aren’t the butt of the joke!” Harry said, reaching his hands under Scorpia’s armpits and hoisting her up onto his hip. “The fact that your parents drive me to drink is the joke!”
Draco pressed his lips together, trying and failing to hide a smile. “Alright, Potter-Malfoys. Is everyone ready?”
“Yesssss!” James and Scorpia hollered.
“Is everyone on their very best Manor behaviour?” Draco asked, his voice becoming imperceptibly posher each time he opened his mouth since stepping through the grate.
“You BETCHA!” James yelled, reaching up to high-five his sister’s foot.
*
“Grandad! We learned a new dance!” James cried with gusto ten minutes later.
“Indeed?” Lucius asked with a bored drawl. “That’s lovely. Draco, have you taken them to see Madame Wexcombe?”
“I say,” Narcissa added, “if they’ve learned the Wizard’s Waltz I’d be tempted to host a small ball.” She turned to Lucius. “Remember how darling Draco looked dancing when he was small? Children, would you be so kind as to give us a performance?”
James smiled and Scorpia began bouncing up and down excitedly. “Yes!” Scorpia enthused. “We’ve been waiting all day, Grammamama.” Scorpia’s little mouth tripped over the syllables.
“It’s ‘Grandmother,’” Narcissa corrected with a smile that teetered on the line between fond indulgence and impatient vexation. “Come here, darling,” she said, holding hand out to Scorpia.
Scorpia looked at her dads, unsure what to do. Harry nodded his most encouraging smile, which, at the moment, came off as quite manic. Reassured nevertheless, Scorpia walked to Narcissa and allowed her grandmother to cast Charms at her hair, bringing the strands off of her face and into a tight chignon. Scorpia winced, but didn’t complain, and Harry squeezed Draco’s hand so hard that his fingernails left marks. Had it gone on one moment longer, one suspects, Harry would have exploded and stopped the madness either with screaming or with magic.
As it was, Narcissa finished her officious hair Charms, brushed down Scorpia’s itchy frills, and patted her back towards her brother. Narcissa looked briefly at James’s hair, but seemed to give that up as a bad job before she’d even begun.
“Can I make the piano play the song?” James asked, eyeing the grand piano that always stood, unused and dustless, in the corner of the large room.
Lucius raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You may try,” he drawled.
James, at seven, was much too young for a wand, or to have much control over his magic. And yet. He scrunched up his eyes, his little cheeks red and still slightly chubby as he stood on the threshold of older childhood, and suddenly the piano began to play, like one of those Muggle player pianos.
Narcissa’s face burst into a delighted smile for one brief moment, until she heard what the piano was playing, at first simply a kind of strange, insistent beat, and then her jaw fell in horror.
The children had their hands in front of them in the air, opening and closing their fingers like little mouths. Then they tucked their hands under their armpits and flapped their elbows.
“What in the name of Salazar’s spirit do they think they are doing?” Lucius seethed.
“It’s called the Chicken Dance,” Harry offered happily, watching his in-laws greedily as if this was the best programme on telly.
The children wagged their bottoms with exaggerated vigor, crouching down toward the marble floor, then sprang up and clapped their hands, all the while singing, “NA NA NA NA NA NA NA” at the top of their lungs.
Lucius had to avert his eyes.
Draco faked a sneeze in order to hide the laughter that he couldn’t keep from his face.
*
For the rest of the visit, Lucius and Narcissa were both abnormally quiet as they contemplated the depth of their descent into ignominy. They did manage to muster their society death glares for Harry.
Draco would try to explain that Harry was not responsible for the Chicken Dance blunder—that, in fact, Draco himself was the one who made the grave and irreversible error to introduce the dance to his children. It had been a low moment—before toothbrushing, like many low moments of parenthood—and Draco had grasped for anything to bring the children back from the brink of chaos and destruction. It was unfortunate that, in his desperation, he thought of the ridiculous dance he’d seen at Dudley and Greg’s non-wedding. Since then, the children hadn’t stopped doing the blasted dance for two weeks, and it was all his fault. But when he would try to explain this to his parents—because he may have been an arsehole but he was not a feed-the-spouse-to-his-horrible-parents type of arsehole—they wouldn’t believe him.
“It was worth it,” Harry would say later, once the children were asleep and their poultry-themed festivities were confined to dreams. “I only wish you’d let me bring a video camera. You have to buy me a Pensieve now.”
“Consider it purchased,” Draco would say. Because if there was anything the Malfoy coffers were good for, it was buying things for his husband that would be used to poke fun at his parents, and to ensure that the Potter-Malfoy children’s fowl dancing would be preserved for all time.