Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Fucking fuck

FUCK

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May 2, 1998, the Battle of Hogwarts, the day he lost it all. Three months ago he was arrested with his parents and put in a holding cell at the Ministry. Some three weeks later his trial was completed. His mother had already died in her cell and his father was already off in Azkaban. But due to perfect Harry Potter he was only sentenced to a year of house arrest. He should be happy technically that he’s not rotting away forever next to his father. But without his mother Malfoy Manor is empty and oppressive - almost worse than it was during the War.

The halls and rooms were ruined, all tainted with the horrible memories of screaming and cackles. The nightmares lasted every night until he slept on the stones out in his mother’s rose garden. He hadn’t been in it for more than two years. She hadn’t dared try to bring him in it while the Manor was occupied. The Dark Lord had been unable to take one thing from her and that was her Lady Malfoy ring. Even his father had been unable to get it off her. That ring was her right from the moment she bonded with Lucius Malfoy and remained so until she died. It was keyed to the wards of the Malfoy Lady’s garden and had remained her only safe place away from the Death Eaters who tried to rape her in her own home, and her own mad sister. He saw her spend days at a time in the garden, even so much as 9 days on one horrible occasion.

He knew the morning she died that she was gone. He felt the snap in his Magic that her ring was taken off her. He lied to himself, insisting Shacklebolt ordered the Unspeakables to get it off her, or the goblins had confiscated it because his father had dissolved their marriage from his cell. Anything but the truth. Two hours later, four Aurors stopped in front of his cell and opened it enough that one Auror stepped in and set the Lady Malfoy ring next to him on the cot.

He looked up from where he’d been watching the Auror’s steps and smiled unnervingly. He’d seen his Aunt Bella do it the same way enough to know how to copy it and get the Carrows to leave him alone during 7th Year. The three Aurors outside flinched at the sight, but the one in front of him didn’t, only Occluding instead. Smart. If he hadn’t learned from his godfather, he wouldn't have seen it.

He picked up the ring and tossed it up and down with his left hand. Finally he said to the Auror,

“Are there Silencing Charms on this cell?”

“Yes.” the man answered. “Rudimentary ones are in place at all times.”

He smiled at that. “You might want to be upping their strength. I’m in shock right now so I’m still lucid, but I won’t be for long. Us Mad Blacks tend to cackle when we really lose it, and I know damn well at least a few of your coworkers can tell you all about dear Auntie Bella. I’ll be done by nighttime. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

With that, he slumped against the wall and dazed out the door with cloudy blue-grey eyes. The Auror backed away and all four left once it was clear he was unresponsive.

By 10 am he was humming. It was a little lullaby his mother sang him as a child, a lullaby she’d promised she would sing to his children one day, or teach his Lady Wife.

By 11 am he was crying, thinking about how she would never get to take a stroll in her rose garden again, or taste her favorite macarons and tea. How she’d never see the light of day again, how she would never get to have her freedom and her life back. She never got to walk around the Manor freely again, knowing she was safe and that some random Snatcher or werewolf wasn’t going to try and jump her and tear at her clothes.

By 12 pm he was screaming. And laughing. And still crying. Hysterical sobbing had never been a good look on him, by which he meant he looked fucking fantastic. The one thing Malfoy’s are, have been, and always will be perfect at, has been emotion control. He was given lessons by his father to show ever emotion humanly possible in the “correct” way. Hysteria was never considered a good emotion to show. Occlumency helped with that. But with the official beginning of the War, he got lessons on how to act like a Mad Black. Mad Blacks are and probably always will be taboo, in the sense that just like every disowned Black family member and questionably Non-Human Malfoy family member, they were not to be spoken of. But here he was, less than a week before his 18th birthday, cackling himself to insanity in a Ministry cell because his mother just died and he didn’t even get to see her before she was gone.

The cackling and crying stopped at 11 at night and the guards were obviously relieved.

The next day Harry Potter testified at his trial and got him a reduced sentence of 12 months house arrest. His mixed emotions didn’t settle for days. The only thing he cared about was getting to bury his mother. His father was already off in Azkaban that morning and in some twisted way he was free. Free from nothing and everything.

Two months later he was reading a notice from the Ministry informing him of his mandated attendance for the Hogwarts 8th Year program. He had been chosen by McGonagall to be Head Boy. His partner? None other than Head Girl Hermione fucking Granger.

Salazar’s wrinkled ballsack.

It had to be a Ministry ploy. After all, this just lost him 10 months of his house arrest time. He was supposed to be out of the country by the time he’d be graduating and getting his NEWT’s. There went his entire plan of testing at the Ministry come June. At this rate he’d only be done with his sentence in April of 2000. Absolutely fucking unacceptable.

His plan to leave Britain and try to get a job in the ICW by next summer was ruined. So he mail ordered books and robes. Now all he had to do was sit in his manor and wait.

Chapter Text

She couldn’t sleep anymore.

All she could hear was their screams.

The Order members, the children, and her parents.

By gods why was she still alive.

Some two years ago she sent her parents away to Australia. Set them up in a nice little beach home a good ways away from Sydney thinking they were safe. They had money, an apartment, nothing at all that would’ve linked them to her. And yet somehow they were still killed. Dolohov was the one who did it, he was obsessed with her after the Department of Mysteries.

She could’ve killed him. She could’ve slit his throat or made him drown in a river that day on the run, any damn thing but let him go. Because she had morals, and her stupid morals had told her to not hurt him.

Her parents were dead, their bodies already buried in Australia, all payed for with their estate months before she found out. She’d gone to the police in Sydney because she couldn’t find any trace of them and two officers had sat her down in the station and told her her parents had been murdered.

It was all her fault.

Their employees at the office and all the neighbors back in London had been wondering about their abrupt departure for months. She was the one who broke it to their employees, who informed other people in the neighborhood.

Thankfully two of the oldest workers at the office had been keeping track of all the business going on and had maintained the taxes and mortgage.

Another failure.

Three months before they died the mortgage was finally paid off. They’d managed to get a good deal of 20 years before they owned the humongous office building, and they had been planning for years to go to Spain on vacation to celebrate. Adding a daughter to the picture never changed anything, but now they would never see their beloved business again.

David and Shirley were godsends but they could only do so much for her. She was an 18 year old with an empty house and no family. Of course she had friends in Harry and the Weasleys but it was complicated. Harry had thrown himself into working at the Ministry alongside Ron, the two accepting Auror positions immediately and obsessing over hunting down the last of Voldemort’s army.

Molly and Arthur along with their children were inconsolable at the loss of Fred. Percy had thrown himself back into bureaucracy, trying to escape the pain of it, and George stayed in his room most days, unresponsive to all but Charlie and Bill, who sat with him and made sure he was taken care of.

Everything hurt and nothing helped. She stayed at Grimmauld Place most days since even Kreacher’s company was better than nothing.

Paparazzi tried to follow her everywhere if she went out, so she hadn’t gone anywhere but the Ministry a few times by the time the letter came in July.

~~

Dear Ms. Hermione J. Granger,

It is my honor to award you the title of Head Girl of Hogwarts for the 1998 to 1999 school year. As an honorary 8th Year student, the staff are here to support your journey towards graduation in every way possible.

5th through 8th Years will experience the opportunity of an alternate learning course this year to better assist their education. Everyone will be given equal opportunity to participate.

Additionally, the Hogwarts Castle is currently under construction to rebuild the damage caused at the Battle of Hogwarts. In this process, it has been determined that the usual House Dormitories are not sufficient in size to hold 1st to 7th Year students along with the additional 8th Year attendees. As such, a new wing on the 3rd floor, on the East side of the castle, has been built to house 8th Year Dormitories. These will not be divided by House, only gender. There will be a Common Room shared by all.

However, per custom as the Head Boy and Girl, you will be sharing a partially conjoined dormitory with your Head counterpart. This dorm will be completely private, but as the Heads, the entrance to your rooms are at the end of the hallway, opening to a private smaller Common Room, with both bedrooms as offshoot rooms. You will have private bathrooms and closets. It is expected that both of you will be respectful of each other’s space as you would any regular dorm mate.

-
You Head counterpart is:

Head Boy Draco L. Malfoy
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Please reply only if you will not be in attendance of the 1998 to 1999 school year. The staff and I eagerly await your arrival on September 1st.

Best regards,
Minerva Isolda McGonagall
Headmistress of Hogwarts

~~

She’d cried when she read the stupid letter. Hogwarts was supposed to be her escape from reality. She wasn’t supposed to remember that her parents were dead and Ron broke up with her by drunkenly announcing that he felt more passion with Lavender Brown and Harry wasn’t taking care of himself most days. It was to be her escape, where all she had to do was sit in class, and go to the library to read, and just sleep until she died too.

It wasn’t fair.

And now she was spending a year with Draco Malfoy. Sleeping in the vicinity of the boy who witnessed her being tortured by his own Aunt.

She just wanted to die.

Except even that wasn’t allowed because with Harry the “Halfblood Boy” out of the house most of the time, Kreacher had decided all his strange affections should be turned to her. She’d torn down Walburga’s portrait the fourth day she was in the house and had honestly only tried it to get a rise out of the sullen elf. But the other portraits only laughed at what she’d done and Kreacher had cackled with glee. It was just like Sirius cackled, less maniacal than Bellatrix in the best of ways.

Kreacher had stared up at her and insisted,

“Mistress would be proud of this one. This one has fire. Better than Blood Traitor Master and even Master Regulus this one. Barely broken. Kreacher will fix.”

To her confusion, Kreacher had then begun to teach her some strange combination of etiquette and Occlumency. It wasn’t anything like Occlumency in reality but saying it helped ground her. He taught her to be, “The daughter Mistress would have wanted.” She allowed it only because it kept her sane.

Harry didn’t comment the one time he came home at 4 am and found Kreacher teaching her a posture lesson by tying her torso to a chair, so she just kept going. She’d rambled to Kreacher one night when the elf got her drunk on Firewhisky that she’d always wanted to work in the Ministry and be the Minister. He retaliated by stacking four books on her head in the morning and continuing those retched posture lessons.

By the end of the week she could walk up and down four consecutive flights of stairs with a ruler stuck to her back with elf Magic forcing her straight, and 15 books on her head to keep her chin up.

And, if there was one thing she loved about Magic, it was stasis charms. In the attic of Grimmauld lived hundreds of dresses under stasis that Kreacher just let her go at. He certainly looked quite pained when she started to tear the decorations off of the dresses, the sashes and pearls piled together on the floor and the jewels stacked in rows on the dining table. Not like he did anything about it though. He wasn’t her elf, so she couldn’t order him, as he was only loyal to the Black Family. But with no new Master he was free for a short while.

The family portraits gasped and giggled at her as she spent days stacking pretty ornaments in the dining hall. She technically didn’t have a right to them, so she was careful with the jewels and pearls, but the sashes and fabrics were lovely to play around with. She learned sewing from her Grandma Granger when she was little, so tearing apart the dressing and making skirts and tops for herself was nothing.

She was distracted by it until the letter came, and that just sent her into a depressive state again. Kreacher read it after her and shook his head, muttering about sensibility and stupid witches.

He ordered her robes and all the books she needed, not even trying to charge her Gringotts account where she’d put all her parents’ money. By August 31st she was physically prepared for Hogwarts.

Now all Hermione needed was a dash of self-confidence and a gods damned will to live again.

Chapter Text

Nephilim are not spoken of in the Malfoy family. New generations had texts practically thrown at them from a distance so they learned things on their own. In the nearly three millennia of recorded history of the family, Nephilims were the most taboo of all the creatures mixed in their blood.

It was a sort of unbreakable curse that born female Malfoys could only be sired by a Nephilim. With the naturally Dark Magic that the bloodline held, male Malfoys could keep a wife with them merely with their life’s will.

It gave ‘Til Death to we Part’ a whole new meaning.

But if that wife was unwilling in the marriage, a Nephilim son could be born. Yet Nephilims, unlike their fathers, could only ever bond and marry with a completely willing wife.

Nephilims naturally craved having children, and in a strange fashion usually only had one or two sons, yet were capable of having anywhere between three and seven daughters.

There had not been a Nephilim born in the family since 1641. He had two daughters, an unusually low number and died in 1694 of Dragonpox. His two daughters had both died giving birth to their first children, meaning no daughters were born in the Malfoy Family since year 1667.

Yet in 1980 a tragic miracle occurred. Narcissa Malfoy née Black gave birth to a Nephilim son. When Draco was eight, his grandfather Abraxas’ portrait privately told him about how his Father nearly tortured his Mother to death the day after he was born, rendering her unable to have any more children.

With the birth of a Nephilim was the fact that the marriage was merely a trap for the mother, so much so that her hatred and disdain for her husband came to life in the form of a demonic child.

Veela were the female counterpart of Nephilim, known for their grace and allure. Nephilim were stronger, more dangerous, and about a million times harder to kill.

Though Nephilim were taboo, they came with the hope of more daughters. Mothers and grandmothers of those girls could find solace that the Nephilim father had at least found the best of his family later in life.

Draco had been raised with knowledge that he had only 16 choices of girls to marry; all of them from the Sacred 28, and some of them his close cousins.

The traits of Nephilim are with the wizard his entire life. They are inherently larger, growing taller than most, and are stronger, having larger Magical Cores. But at 17 they completely unlock their power. It is at that point which they begin to seek out a partner. It is normal for them to be very picky on who they try to court.

Malfoy Nephilims are known to only seek out women who they identify to be of great Magical prowess and intelligence. For Draco, his requirements immediately eliminated every single one of the girls his Father chose for him.

This of course was only a preliminary decision at age 12. So at 16, he revisited the concept of bonding with any of the girls and concluded that once again, not a single one met his standards.

After the War, with his Father in Azkaban for life, Draco was finally free of his expectations. If he got lucky, when he left Britain he would meet the right witch. Or maybe, the Malfoy line would die out with him. Draco privately thought of writing a will to donate all of his wealth to make an institution for squibs in England should he die without an heir.

Hilariously, it seemed that even with the Dark Mark on his arm and a disgraced family name, many sought for his marriage with themselves or a relative. He’d received a dozen betrothal contracts from Sacred 28 families and others in the week after his house arrest began, with every single one offering a sizable dowry.

Dark families or those associated with the Dark Lord seemed to know their options in Britain were limited for the marrying off of their children, particularly the daughters. But strangely (or stupidly perhaps) they chose not to pursue options outside of the Isles, and were offering almost exclusively to fellow Dark families.

With the contracts he got and what he saw in the Daily Prophet, inbreeding would no doubt go up in “popularity” in the following five or so years. A large portion of the next generation of Hogwarts attendees would likely be thicker and uglier than even Crabbe and Goyle had been.

Having been raised with the thought of only having Pureblood girls to choose from, Draco tried to go through all the available girls and see if even one was marginally acceptable. But it was during this vetting process that Draco realized, if he chose a bride in Britain, she couldn’t possibly be a Pureblood. And wasn’t that a revelation.

He’d laughed his ass off at that for a straight two days. The elves had all thought he was becoming Mad no doubt. He’d drunk himself into a stupor on one of the strongest wines in the cellar before announcing it to all the portraits.

They practically all had conniptions when he’d drunkenly laughed his epiphany at them. Some were shouting, others shrieking, but a few of them were silent. It was no surprise that all the silent ones were Nephilim. They’d only watched as he crowed that he might end up marrying a squib if not just stay celibate for the rest of his life.

In a hilarious manner, the portraits began shouting at him that he could marry a Halfblood, of course he could marry who he wanted. Anyone, so long as it ensured the continuation of the Malfoy Family.

He’d left the portrait hall then, not able to stomach the thought of their strange hypocrisy.

The next week was spent in a daze as he finally was able to acknowledge that yes, he was not going to be marrying a Pureblood. If anything, that would likely give him the most despicable looking children, and by Merlin was he vain.

Not a single Pureblood family in Britain hadn’t inbred at least five times in the last couple hundred years.

So, when September 1st rolled around, Draco Malfoy had another objective besides simply surviving the year; find a worthy wife for himself.