The Malfoy Project

𝙻𝚞𝚌𝚒𝚞𝚜 & 𝙽𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚊 - 𝚅𝚒𝚘𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎

✼¹     

     I wanted the baby. 

     Even though it must have not been bigger than a poppy seed, I could feel it squirming inside me, eating me from the inside. And I didn't mind, because it was half of Bas and half of me, and I would have allowed it to drain me to my marrow. 

     I thought perhaps this was the sign I had been asking for all along. It was the ticket, the excuse I needed to convince myself to leave Voldemort. 

     I wanted to change the world, but I was too young to understand that reasons for such things were never singular. Only years later would I recognise that we were compensating for something else we lacked in life. Lucius was there because he was under Abraxas's thumb, Bellatrix because she wanted something to love, and me— well, I was there because I figured that feeling like I was doing something was better than not doing anything at all.

     Now I had another purpose, a greater one. It wasn't to run with these beings of darkness that were hellbent on changing the world, but to dwell in the one that already existed; a place where the sun glittered and no progress was a good thing, because no progress meant life carried on as it would my family. 

     My parents would not disown me for carrying Bas's child. A daughter muddying the bloodline would bring unimaginable shame to the family, and they were much too proud to be embroiled in such a scandal. They'd already suffered the embarrassment of Ronnie, and I knew that with me, they would lie, persuade, bribe their way through ministers and newspapers to ensure the truth of my baby's parentage would never see the light of day. 

     The baby meant I did not have to choose.

✧

     It was a naïve thought. Childish. Puerile. 

     Cissy could think all these things because while she was sitting at home thinking of what colour dress to buy next, or whether to have fish or steak for dinner, I was in my father's office, sifting through lists of the dead. 

     Muggles and wizards murdered in riots, missions gone wrong, trampled under the feet of the unpredictable giants, or torn apart by the werewolves over petty disagreements. Name after name after name I skimmed through; some I recognised, some I didn't. But no matter who they were or what role they played, they were all reduced to nothing but a name amongst dozens, two words to be read then discarded from memory to make space for another.

     I visited the huts and cottages in the remote moors where we held and interrogated our prisoners-of-war: Aurors and allies of Dumbledore, Muggles who couldn't distinguish Imperio from Crucio, watched my underlings scrub the floors clean of blood so we could not be traced. 

     I followed the Snatchers into the forests so they could point out the spots where they had disposed of the bodies, to make sure they were buried deep enough. 

     All these tasks I conducted at the behest of my father, who insisted that for me to take over his role correctly, I first had to know the ins and outs of how things worked. I needed to learn how to clean up my tracks, reset a room to how it was before, catch oversights of the Snatchers and Death Eaters. 

     It was a dirty job to me, too close to the crime. It was not the comfort I was promised. But I also knew that if I wanted to be able to sit behind a desk at a job, where the only thing I had to do was make niceties over tea, and the only effort I had to spare was to drag a quill over a slip of parchment, this was the induction I had to go through — for the sake of myself, and the family I will have in the future.