Side Story Four: Lucius's Ambition (Lucius's Perspective)
The following morning, Lucius Malfoy heard through the Ministry's more discreet channels that Dementors were being deployed to guard Hogwarts. He expressed this view at the breakfast table with the particular disgust he reserved for Ministry incompetence.
"They've lost their minds." He set down his fork. "Every child at that school is completely defenceless against Dementors. Are they sending them there to catch a criminal, or to throw a party for those wretched creatures?"
Narcissa's composure darkened.
"Even a full deployment from Azkaban wouldn't catch Pettigrew," she said. "He's escaped once already. The Ministry is wasting everyone's time."
"One could argue there's always the element of luck," Lucius said, without conviction. "Though I still think sending Dementors near a school full of children is unconscionable."
Narcissa said nothing more. She had not told her husband about her visit to Grimmauld Place, nor about what she'd learned there. She knew Lucius's feelings about Sirius Black — pure-blood traitor, disgrace to the family — and she had no patience for the lecture that would follow.
Besides, she was far too busy to have that argument.
"Narcissa, isn't this going slightly far?" Lucius asked one afternoon, pausing in his circuit of the grounds with the two Deerhounds. He looked at the house-elves who were busily reinforcing the manor walls, and at the rubble of the stone lamp-posts that had flanked the east garden gate. "Those lamps were your design. You were very proud of them."
"If Pettigrew's Animagus form were an elephant or a wild boar, the problem would be simple," Narcissa said, arms folded, watching the elves work with the calm of a woman who has already made all her decisions. "But he's a rat. He could come through any gap, at any hour."
Lucius looked at his wife for a moment. He had seen that expression before, and he knew better than to argue with it.
"Change whatever you need to change," he said. "As long as you feel it's secure."
"Good." She turned back to the elves. "Carry on."
Narcissa had become, in her own particular way, neurotic.
The knowledge of how Pettigrew had evaded the Dementors had done two things to her simultaneously: it had destroyed any remaining faith she had in the Ministry's ability to recapture him, and it had produced a very specific and persistent terror that he could slip into Malfoy Manor in rat form without anyone being the wiser.
She responded to this terror the way she responded to most problems — thoroughly and without sentiment.
More detection wards went up around the manor. Shielding charms were layered over the grounds. She consulted a specialist in magical security who charged an obscene amount and was worth every Knut. By the time she was finished, Malfoy Manor was, as Lucius later observed in a rare moment of humour, better fortified than Gringotts.
Draco was also not permitted to leave.
And since Draco was not permitted to leave, his eagle owl Joan — who had been named by Draco at age nine after a Muggle historical figure he'd encountered in a book and found inexplicably impressive — entered a period of professional crisis.
One morning in mid-August, Draco returned from a solo Quidditch practice sweating and windswept, and found Joan in her perch, methodically pulling her own feathers out with her beak.
"Joan." He stared at her. "Please don't do that."
Joan fixed him with the kind of look that conveyed deep personal betrayal and went back to the feathers.
"You haven't fallen out of favour," he told her, offering a handful of owl treats. "There simply haven't been any letters. It isn't your fault. It isn't a commentary on your abilities."
Joan accepted the treats with visible reluctance, glared at him once more, buried her head beneath her remaining wing, and resolved to be unapproachable.
He brought this up at breakfast.
"Mother, Joan is going to develop a psychological condition," he said. "She needs to work."
"Little Dragon," Narcissa said, in the tone she used when she had already considered and dismissed an argument, "owls can be tracked. The enemy could find your location through a returning owl."
"I'll be at Hogwarts in two weeks."
"Which is exactly why we need to be particularly careful now."
That same morning, a letter arrived at Malfoy Manor bearing the Hogwarts seal. Narcissa saw it first, recognised it, and quietly moved it closer to her own plate.
"Little Dragon." She looked at her son across the table. "When you go back to school, no one can protect you the way I can here. You'll have two threats to manage: Pettigrew, and the Dementors."
"I know." He met her gaze, and something in his steadiness seemed to cost him. "Running away won't help. I want to be strong enough to protect myself when it matters." He paused. "I want to learn the Patronus Charm."
Narcissa's expression changed completely. "Yes," she said immediately. "That's exactly right."
Lucius looked up from his newspaper. He said nothing, but his free hand moved, almost without his knowing, to his left forearm — pressing briefly against the spot beneath his sleeve where the Dark Mark sat. The Mark that made the Patronus Charm impossible for him.
"I'll teach you," Narcissa said. She turned her wand — elegant, silver-studded — and cast.
A silver robin emerged from the wand tip. It was small and perfectly formed, and it circled the room once with swift, quiet wingbeats before dissolving like mist near the ceiling.
"It's beautiful," Draco said, very quietly.
Lucius cleared his throat. "Defence Against the Dark Arts professors at that school are apparently incapable of teaching anything genuinely useful," he said, setting down his newspaper. "Come to the dungeon this afternoon. I'll teach you what I can."
"Yes, Father."
Lucius's expression was stern. But his eyes, briefly, were not.
For the next several days, the underground training room in Malfoy Manor's basement saw considerable use.
Lucius was, as it turned out, an excellent teacher when he chose to be — which he disguised entirely behind brisk instruction and a tendency to comment on imperfect form. He drilled Draco through an arsenal of jinxes, counter-jinxes, and a number of spells whose classification Draco chose not to think about too carefully.
"Your spellwork is clean," Lucius said one afternoon, sweeping a cloud of dust from his robes with a single flick. "The Sandstorm and Blasting Curses are strong. Now try Levicorpus — it's Severus's invention, and I find it consistently underestimated."
This was how Lucius Malfoy expressed love for his son. Not directly. Never directly. Through the careful, methodical transfer of every tool he possessed for surviving a dangerous world.
If there had been a Marauder's Map of Malfoy Manor, Draco's name would have appeared frequently in the underground Potions laboratory as well.
During his month in Bath, he and Hermione had worked through their Hogwarts summer homework with systematic efficiency across almost daily meetings, which freed up his remaining time for private work. He was still attempting to reconstruct the improved dragonpox treatment formula he half-remembered from his previous life. Progress was slow and frustrating.
"Dobby, clean the crucibles," he said one evening, making several more notations on his parchment and crossing out a proportion he'd thought might work and didn't. "All of them."
Dobby, who had apparently also been experiencing a period of restless energy, cleaned the crucibles with the focused intensity of someone who needed the occupation.
A portion of each day went to Quidditch. Marcus Flint was still captain this year, and Flint did not operate on sentiment or past performance — team selection was a straightforward matter of who was best on the day. Draco had no intention of being anything other than the best Seeker he was capable of being. Since his rebirth, Quidditch was one of the few things that produced genuine uncomplicated feeling in him — the specific joy of speed and precision and outflying someone who thought they had you beaten.
He wanted the Quidditch Cup. He intended to get it.
"How many today?" Narcissa asked Dobby one morning, passing the Quidditch pitch on her walk.
"Two hundred thrown, two hundred caught," Dobby said proudly, collecting the scattered Muggle golf balls from the grass.
Narcissa gave a satisfied nod and walked on. The golf balls — a training method borrowed from Muggle sport — were used for catching precision and reaction speed. It was effective, and Draco had adopted the practice two summers ago.
He could have pushed further. Three hundred. Four hundred.
But he hadn't been sleeping well, and he knew it.
August was not kind to him.
He couldn't explain it precisely, and he didn't try. His Occlumency, reliable through most of the year, seemed to lose its grip in the small hours — and when it did, the memories that flooded in were not the ordinary kind. They were the specific memories of Malfoy Manor. Things that had happened in these rooms, in that long dining hall, in the drawing room where he had stood and done nothing.
He woke most mornings already tired.
He managed, as he always did, to keep this invisible. He ate breakfast, trained, brewed, corresponded, practised his spells, and appeared to his parents as a composed and purposeful boy who had everything under control.
But July — Bath, the skateboard, the square, the Granger family's table, a girl's laugh in the evening light — felt very distant now. Almost like something that had happened to a different version of him.
He remained that other thing instead: the boy who had seen too much, who carried memories no one else knew he carried, who woke up reaching for something that wasn't there.
He was very good, by now, at not dwelling on this.
The day before term started, Narcissa held up his robes from last year and surveyed them critically. "He's grown several inches," she announced to Lucius, as though Draco were not standing there.
"Then we'll buy new ones," Lucius said, from behind his newspaper.
"Is Diagon Alley safe?" Narcissa was already frowning.
"The Ministry has doubled its presence there today. Potter is going tomorrow, which is more than enough to make Fudge neurotic about security." Lucius turned a page. "He lives in terror of that boy being harmed on his watch."
Narcissa considered this. "Madam Malkin's, then. And textbooks."
"What does he need?"
She retrieved the envelope — the Hogwarts letter — from beside her plate and drew out the parchment inside. She read aloud: "Intermediate Transfiguration, Standard Book of Spells Grade Three, a Numerology and Grammatica, Spellman's Syllabary for Ancient Runes, The Monster Book of Monsters—"
"That last one doesn't sound like a proper textbook," Lucius said.
"Care of Magical Creatures," Draco said, carefully neutral.
Lucius's expression suggested what he thought of this.
"Hagrid was recommended by Professor Dumbledore," Draco offered, with the particular innocent tone he deployed when his father was about to say something that Draco needed to quietly redirect. "I'm sure he has his qualities."
Lucius looked at his son for a long moment, in the way of a man who suspects he is being managed and cannot quite catch the moment it happened. "Stay away from that gamekeeper," he said finally. "I believe he has giant blood. Giants are violent by nature."
"Of course, Father."
Draco had chosen Care of Magical Creatures for three reasons, none of which he mentioned to his parents:
First, he would not take Divination. He had no desire to sit in a circular room full of incense while Professor Trelawney made pronouncements — even unlikely ones — about the details of his rebirth. She was eccentric, yes, but she was also a genuine descendant of Cassandra Trelawney, and she had made at least one prophecy in her life that had caused catastrophic harm to people he knew. She deserved to be taken seriously, and that was precisely why he intended to stay away.
Second, he would not take Muggle Studies. Setting aside his parents' reaction, he could not walk into a classroom taught by Charity Burbage without seeing, very clearly, the image of her floating above the table in the Manor's dining hall.
Which left Hagrid. The hippogriff would be unpleasant. He remembered that clearly. But it was a manageable unpleasantness, and Hagrid, for all his roughness, was genuinely kind. That counted for something.
He kept all of this to himself, nodded agreeably at his father's continued reservations, and went to pack his trunk.
Side Story Four: Lucius's Ambition
(Lucius's Perspective)
Lucius Malfoy had been in a low mood lately, which he would not have admitted to anyone and which expressed itself chiefly as an increased tendency to snap at Ministry subordinates.
He should, by any objective measure, be one of the most comfortable men in the wizarding world. The finest wife imaginable. The most promising son in a generation of Malfoys. A position of genuine influence. Wealth that required active effort to fully spend.
He could have rested. He could have handed the Malfoy family's affairs to competent solicitors and spent the remainder of his life doing exactly as he pleased.
He didn't, because that was not who he was.
He woke every morning thinking about consolidation — more influence in the Ministry's upper tiers, stronger leverage in the Wizengamot, social positioning that would mean his wife walked into any room in the wizarding world and received the deference she deserved. This was the project of his life, and he was good at it, and he found it satisfying in the way that any man is satisfied by doing what he is genuinely suited for.
The trouble was that lately, the project kept encountering obstacles.
The diary affair had been quietly humiliating. His scheme had produced no meaningful result, had nearly endangered his position on the school board, and had been resolved — with embarrassing neatness — by his own thirteen-year-old son writing him a warning letter in time. Draco had somehow acquired detailed inside information about the situation at Hogwarts, assessed it correctly, and acted on it before Lucius could do anything catastrophically unwise.
His son had cleaned up his mistake. Lucius had needed time to come to terms with this.
Arthur Weasley remained at the Ministry, exactly where Lucius had hoped not to find him. Dumbledore remained at Hogwarts, cheerfully impervious to any pressure that had been applied. Both situations were frustrating.
He had allowed himself a few days of satisfaction when Draco received the Order of Merlin — practically strutting through the Ministry atrium, truth be told, in those first days after the announcement. Lucius Malfoy, whose son had caught Peter Pettigrew. Arthur Weasley, whose twin sons had helped him do it. The symmetry was almost enjoyable.
Almost.
Because the inevitable question had followed: the reason Draco had that information, the reason he'd been able to work with Fred and George Weasley, was that he had apparently developed genuine, functioning relationships with Gryffindors.
Lucius had complicated feelings about this.
On the one hand: Harry Potter was clearly exceptional. The boy had done something to that diary in the Chamber of Secrets that Lucius still hadn't fully worked out, and whatever it was, it had required real ability. Getting close to Harry Potter was, strategically, the correct move for any Slytherin of ambition.
On the other hand: Arthur Weasley's sons. The Weasley children were Gryffindors by nature and Muggle-sympathisers by upbringing, and they surrounded Potter like a wall. If Draco was going to maintain his relationship with Potter, the Weasleys were unavoidable.
And the thought that occasionally surfaced, which Lucius disliked most: Sirius Black had also started with a group of Gryffindor friends. And looked how that had ended — burned off the family tapestry, dead to the Blacks for twenty years.
He told himself, firmly and repeatedly, that Draco was not Sirius Black. Draco was sensible. Draco maintained the correct balance — present with the Gryffindors when it was useful, but never losing himself in their orbit. He had earned a medal while the Weasley boys were along for the ride. He managed the relationship without being managed by it.
This was reassuring. Lucius tried to take reassurance from it.
What was not reassuring was Narcissa.
Narcissa had been frightened, and Narcissa frightened was — Lucius searched for the word — exhausting. Not in any way that diminished her; she was still the sharpest woman he'd ever known and entirely capable of restructuring a manor's security apparatus from scratch in under a week. But the fear that lived behind her eyes was not something he could fix, and he was not accustomed to being unable to fix things that affected his wife.
Then she started pressuring him to learn to become an Animagus.
"At your age?" he'd said, turning to look at her in bewilderment.
Narcissa's response to this was to grab him by the collar in the second-floor corridor, press him back against the wall, and look at him with the expression of someone who has entirely run out of patience.
She was very close. He could smell the iris in her perfume.
"It is not a joke," she said, her voice doing something that was rather unfair given the circumstances. "Learn it. When you manage a full transformation, come to my room."
She kissed him — brief, deliberate — and walked away down the corridor.
"Narcissa," Lucius called after her, aware that his voice was doing something undignified. "This could take years. Several years. Could we not—"
She turned the corner without looking back.
Lucius stood in the corridor for a moment, composing himself, his cane making a small dent in the carpet where he'd pressed it.
He was, for the first time he could clearly recall, genuinely at a loss.
He would have to learn to become an Animagus.
He was also, he noted with some private astonishment, not entirely unwilling.