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Lucius, Age 33, Morning of His Birthday
Lucius Malfoy awoke on his birthday with the serene satisfaction of a man whose life was, quite frankly, perfect.
The bed was warm, the house elves had drawn the curtains to let in the early autumn light, and in precisely twelve hours he would host the social event of the Wiltshire calendar. Invitations had been fought over. Wizards with seats on the Wizengamot had grovelled for a place on the guest list. Even the French Minister for Magic had sent a rare bottle of matured Firewhisky “with regrets” for not being able to attend.
And this year, the centrepiece of the festivities would be his pride and joy: the Albino Peacock Flock of Malfoy Manor.
They had been imported at ruinous expense from a specialist breeder in France — each bird an impeccable specimen of pure white plumage, their tails a living snowfall when fully fanned. Lucius had trained them personally to parade the grounds in perfect concentric formation.
Lucius had trained them himself, personally overseeing their diet (glacial water imported from Iceland, hand-shelled hazelnuts), their exercise (morning struts around the east lawn), and their presentation (a specially crafted grooming charm designed to catch the light at precisely the right angle).
He had spent weeks perfecting their parade: a slow, sweeping procession in perfect concentric formation, designed to frame the grand marble fountain in the courtyard just as the guests stepped outside for champagne.
The guests would gasp. The rivals would seethe. Perfection.
Draco, Age 7, Same Morning
Draco Malfoy awoke with a plan.
It was his father’s birthday, and what did Father love more than anything?
“Me,” Draco thought immediately, but for the sake of variety, he went with: Peacocks.
And what did Father love second-most? House pride.
And so — after careful reasoning worthy of a prodigy — Draco decided that the most perfect gift imaginable would be to take the pure white peacocks Father adored… and improve them.
Emerald and silver plumage. Slytherin colors. The grandest, most thoughtful birthday surprise in wizarding history.
He imagined it: the flock gliding across the manicured lawn, their shimmering tails a living banner of House Malfoy. The guests would murmur in awe. Mother would dab at the corner of her eye. Father would look at Draco with rare, unqualified pride and perhaps even clap him on the shoulder. Draco’s breath caught at the thought.
Of course, the fact that peacocks were originally emerald before generations of breeding had rendered them white was irrelevant. Draco had decided his father needed emerald peacocks, and therefore emerald peacocks he would have.
The only thing standing between him and his historic gift was the minor problem that he was seven, wandless, and forbidden from casting magic outside of lessons with his governess.
Easily solved.
Mother’s wand was in her dressing room.
He slipped down the corridor like a professional thief — or at least, how he imagined a professional thief would. He somersulated past the library door, pressed his back flat against the corridor walls like a shadowy assassin (never mind the broad daylight spilling through every window), and paused dramatically at each doorway to peer around the frame with his hands outstretched in high-alert readiness. No one stopped him. Not a single house-elf intercepted his path to greatness. This, Draco decided, was a sign from the fates. The marble floors were cold under his slippers; the air smelled faintly of polished wood and the faint floral perfume Mother favoured.
The door to her dressing room was ajar, sunlight spilling across a wall of mirrors and glass-fronted wardrobes. Her wand rested in its usual place on the vanity, gleaming faintly against the ivory tabletop.
Unfortunately, the tabletop was about level with Draco’s chin.
He eyed the distance, then backed up a step. One running jump later, he scrambled onto the velvet-upholstered vanity stool, wobbled for a perilous moment, and snatched up the wand.
It was heavier than he’d expected — warm and oddly alive, as though it had a pulse of its own. He had never actually held a wand before, not properly; his training wand for his lessons with his Governess was just a charmed stick of polished yew, inert and weightless compared to the real thing. This felt powerful and dangerous.
Just the thing for peacock enhancement.
As for the method — Draco had recently witnessed his parents use a colour-changing charm in the drawing room for what he could only describe as the most gloriously petty reason imaginable. A visiting dignitary from the Continent had arrived in robes that clashed horrendously with the Malfoy salon’s autumn décor. While the man’s back was turned, Mother had flicked her wand with casual precision, turning the guest’s lurid plum-coloured hat a tasteful shade of cream. Father had smirked and Draco, watching from the doorway, had committed the wand movement to memory.
He could do it. He would do it.
After all, how hard could it be to change a few bird feathers?
He slid the wand into his palm like a duellist preparing for glory, hopped down from the stool, and set off for the gardens — where an unsuspecting flock of rare, perfectly groomed albino peacocks were about to become the proudest Slytherins in Wiltshire.
By the time he reached the French doors leading to the gardens, his heart was hammering. Through the glass he could see them: the Albino Peacock Flock of Malfoy Manor, strutting and gliding across the emerald lawn like a chorus line of snow.
“Right,” Draco muttered to himself. “Let’s make history.”
He stepped outside, closing the door behind him with the slow, silent precision of a professional burglar, and approached the birds. They turned their icy blue eyes toward him, heads cocking in eerie unison.
Draco raised the wand — Mother’s wand — feeling the weight of destiny in his palm. The color-change charm was simple enough. Just a twist at the wrist, a flourish, and the incantation he’d heard Mother use: Colovaria.
He took a deep breath, aimed at the largest peacock in the centre of the flock, and whispered, “Emerald and silver, if you please.”
“Colovaria!”
The effect was immediate — just… not the right effect.
The bird gave a strangled squawk. Instead of shifting into rich Slytherin colors, its entire plume shivered violently, and then every feather exploded off its body at once.
The others caught sight of their suddenly naked leader, and panic swept through the ranks. One by one, the rest of the flock erupted into a frenzy of shrieking, flapping, and spontaneous total baldness, their proud tails now reduced to scrawny, quill-less sticks.
Draco stood frozen, wand still raised, mouth open in silent horror.
Draco blinked. The peacock in front of him stared back, its magnificent white tail… gone. Not even a single feather remained. Just a long, bare, goose-like backside and a look of deep, personal betrayal.
“Oh,” Draco said faintly.
Behind him, another peacock ruffled in alarm—only for the rest of the flock to begin losing feathers in sympathetic horror. Within seconds, the lawn looked as though it had been hit by a blizzard, except the snowflakes were expensive, imported plumage.
It was worse up close: at seven years old, the birds were his size . Eye level. And without their dazzling plumage, they looked less like majestic Slytherin mascots and more like oversized, vengeful poultry.
Draco froze. This was bad. This was really bad.
But he was nothing if not determined.
“It’s fine,” he muttered to himself, raising Mother’s wand again. “We just… try again. That’s what proper wizards do.”
He aimed at the nearest bald peacock, muttered the charm once more and flicked.
Another poof .
Now the peacock was bald and slightly smoking.
It hissed at him with vengeance in its heart.
By the time he heard the distant sound of Father’s voice calling for him, Draco was standing in the middle of the lawn, surrounded by seven completely bald, furious peacocks, their naked necks craning toward him like he was the harbinger of doom.
Well, it certainly didn’t go as intended. But he had done magic! Mother and Father would certainly be pleased about that. And while the peacocks didn’t look as intended, bald peacocks could still be stylish Draco reasoned. Perhaps they’d look sleeker. Edgier. Father liked rare things, and surely bald peacocks were very rare.
A voice, ice-cold and sharp as a blade, cut through the chaos.
“…Draco.”
He turned slowly.
His father stood at the top of the marble steps, framed by the grand arch of the manor’s rear terrace. His immaculate birthday robes billowed faintly in the autumn breeze. Behind him, the house-elves hovered in horrified silence.
Lucius’s gaze swept from his son, to the flock of trembling, nude peacocks, and back again. His jaw tightened.
“Explain,” he said, voice dangerously calm.
Draco’s first instinct was to lie. His second was to run. In the end, he did neither — mostly because the nearest peacock chose that exact moment to shriek like a banshee and sprint in a naked panic between them. He watched his father descend the steps, eyes narrowing in something like heartbreak as he surveyed his pride and joy (the flock, not Draco).
Draco beamed “I made them emerald and silver! For house spirit!”
Lucius tremored with rage, “…They are neither emerald, nor silver.”
“They were supposed to be,” Draco insisted. “But the magic went… sideways…”
Lucius — 11:53 AM
He was fastening his cufflinks when it happened.
The first scream came from the gardens. Not a human scream. This was the unholy shriek of a peacock in distress, a sound like a banshee attempting opera while being stepped on.
Lucius hands went still and he strode to the window. Froze.
What he saw stopped him cold in his tracks.
The flock was naked.
Utterly, shockingly bald.
Not a ruffled feather to be seen. Pale skin gleamed under the midday sun, goose-pimpled and obscene, every knobbled joint and awkward wing-bend laid bare. A few birds stood frozen mid-strut, as if too humiliated to complete the motion. One poor hen was attempting to hide behind the sundial. Another simply sat down, as though life had lost all meaning.
Their glorious, impossible, French-import tails were gone. The once-snowy expanse of the south lawn was littered with limp, defeated plumes, drifting in the breeze like a battlefield after some avian war.
Lucius’s heart clenched. This wasn’t a celebration of his birth. This was a death.
And in the centre of the carnage: Draco. Seven years old. Wand in hand.
Lucius pressed a hand to the window frame, steadying himself. He could not faint. Not today.
Every guest arriving in a few hours would see this. This obscenity. The Malfoy name would be dragged into the mud. He would never again be able to walk through Wiltshire without whispers of “the naked peacock affair” .
Merlin help him, his perfect, regal, intelligent avians would never have been this foolish. And yet here was his son — his human son, in all his well-fed, bright-eyed stupidity — beaming as if he had just saved the wizarding world.
Lucius tore himself from the window, sweeping through the corridor at a near-run, his robes billowing like a storm cloud. Each step was weighted with dread.
The moment he stepped into the garden, the birds turned toward him. All at once.
A dozen cold, reptilian eyes blinked, their stares heavy with something between shame and accusation. The air was thick with the smell of singed keratin.
Lucius took in their mottled pink and white skin, the peculiar knobbiness of their knees, the way their long necks now looked too thin, too vulnerable. They were— Merlin forgive him —hideous.
Lucius opened his mouth to speak and found he could barely form words. “You…” he began, but nothing coherent followed.
Draco beamed. “Happy birthday, Father!”
Lucius closed his eyes. How — and more importantly, why — had fate decided to curse him with a child? He swallowed hard, forcing his voice into something measured.
“Explain,” he croaked.
Draco began to speak, but Lucius heard only the rushing of blood in his ears, a roar that swallowed his son’s words whole. Darkness threatened the edge of his vision; he very nearly swooned. With a violent turn on his heel, he strode back toward the manor. He could not do this alone. He needed… a mediator. Someone to keep him from doing something rash.
“Narcissa!” he barked as soon as he reached the salon.
A moment later, she glided in, serene as ever, a teacup in hand. “What is it, dearest?”
Lucius gripped the back of a chair so tightly the carved wood creaked. “Your son has — violated them.”
Her brows arched. “Them?”
“My peacocks.” His voice cracked. “My children .”
Narcissa tilted her head, unruffled. “Lucius, you do realize they are birds—”
“Albino peacocks imported from a specialist breeder in France! Bred for purity, for grace!” He broke off, visibly trembling. “He has… stripped them… defiled them.”
There was a pause. Then, delicately, Narcissa said, “The guests will… not like to see dinner wandering about before it’s served.”
Lucius stared at her. “This is not the time for your jokes, Narcissa.”
“I know farm-to-table is all the rage these days,” she mused, “but this is a bit much, even for Wiltshire society.”
Lucius clutched the back of the chair as if it were a life raft. “Narcissa, please.”
She set her teacup aside and finally looked out the window. “Oh… my.” Her tone was flat, but her eyes betrayed amusement.
Out on the lawn, Draco had spotted them and was waving. “Mother! I did magic!”
Narcissa stepped closer to the window. “Draco… is that my wand?”
“Yes!” Draco called up proudly. “I tried to make their feathers Slytherin colors but… they fell off instead…”
“If I had wanted emerald peacocks, I would have purchased them! I would never —” Lucius shut his eyes. A squib, he thought wildly. If only the boy were a squib, my birds would still have their dignity.
Draco, meanwhile, was absolutely glowing with self-satisfaction, as though he’d just revolutionized the field of Transfiguration.
Lucius turned away from the window with the air of a man who had survived a natural disaster but knew the worst was yet to come. “Narcissa, we have three hours until the guests arrive.”
Her hand flew to her pearls. “Three hours? Lucius, that is no time at all. We may as well send out funeral notices instead of invitations.”
Lucius took a single, shuddering breath. “Summon the elves.”
Within seconds, half a dozen of them materialised in the salon — led by a trembling, wide-eyed Dobby, who clutched a tea towel like it was a shield.
Lucius didn’t waste time. “The peacocks,” he said, his voice low and dangerous, “must be restored. At once. Before the first guest arrives. I don’t care what you must do. Potions. Charms. Surgical intervention.”
Dobby glanced nervously toward the garden. “Sir… they is… very naked, sir.”
“I am aware, Dobby,” Lucius hissed. “I have eyes .”
Lucius waved his hand, and the elves were dispatched like an elite task force. Outside, the lawn turned into a surreal triage unit.
First came the potions — glossy hair tonics repurposed from Narcissa’s vanity, feather-growth elixirs dredged from the back of the Malfoy potions cupboard. The results were… mixed. One bird sprouted a sad tuft of fluff directly in the middle of its back, another grew a single luxurious tail feather while the rest of its body remained appallingly bare, and a third’s skin took on a faintly greenish sheen, making it look as if it were rotting from the neck down.
“They are burning ,” Narcissa noted idly, shielding her eyes. Indeed, the exposed pale skin was already blotching red and pink under the early autumn sun.
“Shade them!” Lucius barked.
Two elves immediately produced parasols, following the birds like overzealous Victorian nannies. This did nothing for the fact that the flock now looked like a gang of embarrassed poultry being escorted to the seaside.
Next came the glue.
Feathers, salvaged from the grass, were painstakingly “reapplied” to the birds with a thick, sticky paste that smelled faintly of mucilage. The results were horrifying. Clumps stuck at odd angles, tails drooped like bedraggled brooms, and several birds immediately began plucking at themselves in confusion, undoing hours of work in seconds.
One especially unfortunate peacock ended up with an entire tail glued upside down, giving the impression of a large, aggressive white mop.
His immaculate, perfect flock loathed him now. Would not come near him. Hissed. One even spat.
Lucius could not look at them without feeling his throat tighten.
He was pacing the lawn now, one hand clamped over his mouth, the other gripping his cane hard enough to whiten his knuckles. His eyes glistened with the unspeakable sorrow of a man betrayed by fate. “Coats,” he muttered suddenly. “We shall have to… clothe them.”
Narcissa, who had been lounging under the shade of a lilac bush, raised one elegant brow. “You want the peacocks to wear… coats.”
“Would you prefer they greet our guests looking like… that ?” Lucius snapped, gesturing to a bird attempting to hide its shame behind a topiary.
The elves scrambled again. Within minutes, they had produced an assortment of miniature garments from who-knew-where — knitted dog sweaters, filched baby cloaks, even a few repurposed tea cozies.
The peacocks were dressed.
It was, without question, the most disturbing sight Lucius Malfoy had ever beheld: twelve massive, pallid birds, swaddled in mismatched woollens, tottering awkwardly across the grass. One was wearing a bright red jumper with I ♥ DAD stitched across the front.
“Lucius,” Narcissa murmured, “I think the sweaters make them look… smaller.”
Lucius’s nostrils flared. “I will never forgive him.”
In the distance, Draco — still clutching his mother’s wand — waved brightly. “Did I make them better yet?”
Lucius closed his eyes. “Dobby,” he said faintly, “Fetch me a drink. And then… fetch me a new heir.”