The Fear
Summer ended early that year.
Not just for me, but for everyone who was there on the last night. I have often thought of that in the years since, of how many lives were blown apart by one man's false moves on that night, but at the time I had thoughts for no one but myself and my family. I was selfish, but I was terrified. When I feel the guilt consume me now, I ask myself, what could I have done? What could anyone have done? There were no options, no fork in the road, just one path, straight and fast, one way to go. One task to fulfil.
After the last night of summer, they took away my father and locked him up. He had been part of that criminal organisation for many years, that organisation that targeted that group of people and did those things to them. The details didn't matter to me. It wasn't wrong, it was righteous. It was for the greater good. That's what everyone said. We were destroying the scum, cleansing the world for a new generation.
It was sickening. Maybe I saw that at the time, but nothing motivates people like fear, and I was filled with that. Our master was good at filling people with fear. With the threat of the murder of your whole family hanging over you, it's easy to be forced into something that ordinarily would be inhumane or unthinkable. That's the threat he used on me, the manipulative, calculating move he chose to make me work. I was just a pawn in his game, I see that now. He gave me a job, but I was expendable, unimportant. He knew I would never do it. He knew I could never do it.
Until the last night, no one knew he was real for sure. There had been whispers, confusion, a prickly unsettlement, but for near to sixteen years no true sighting, no certainty of where he was or if he was even still alive. I had known. My family were some of his most devoted servants, paying the cost of our master's dirty work, marching alongside his faithful followers at their deathly gatherings. I am sure my father was involved in all kinds of ugly crime before his imprisonment. Most of it, I prefer not to think about. When I was young, a man visited our house to speak to my father. I heard his accusatory voice echo through the empty hallways.
'It is often said of the Malfoy family that you will never find one at the scene of the crime, though their fingerprints might be all over the guilty wand.'
My father ordered him to leave our house after that. The man spat at his feet as he left.
Afterwards, Father said it was a common man, a nobody, nothing important or worthy of conversation. I found it so easy to belong to my old and noble family, to taunt people who irked me, to be confident and happy and loved. After the last night, I found it difficult to feel anything but fear.
My mother was shaken by her husband's imprisonment, and was driven to a wildly desperate terror at the task our master gave me. She knew what the price would be if I failed. The lives of our whole family were at stake, mine more than any, as I was the one given that unachievable goal to work towards. It was a punishment for my father's mistake on the last night, the mistake that cost him his freedom, and my mother was hysterical with fear. My aunt said that it was my father's fault he was in prison.
'I was not captured! I managed to escape unscathed! Your son should be proud to undertake this task. It is the most special, and prestigious, you surely know that.'
My mother slapped her across the face and told her never to speak of my father like that again. Her own sister, she slapped in an uncontrollable fit or unsuppressed anger and terror. These were dark times, the very darkest times, even for those of us who had supposedly picked the safer side.
When I was first given my task, I was proud, even if just for the most fleeting second. Now I could prove myself, now I could show what I was truly capable of. But as time went on, I saw the terrible truth that this really was a hopeless and impossible task. But my fear helped nobody. Fear would not free my father from his incarcerated mess. Fear would not show the world what I was capable of. I had to channel my fear, had to be something better than the hysterical, fear-driven woman my mother had become.
And so I trained.
I neglected my school studies that year. What did those grades matter now, now that I was serving my master in his most important mission? My aunt taught me her arts, trained me for my mission. She was a cold-hearted, evil, insane woman, with no love for anything but our master. I see that now. But from her I learnt to grow a thick shell of aggression behind which my fear could hide. I converted that fear into anger. It fuelled my mission.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
I took the terror and converted it to the darkness that would let me do what I so needed to do.
I took the past failures and made them the hope that was the only thing I could hold onto for future success.
I tried to take my aunt's passion, her pure and undiluted love for our master, and recreate it within myself, but I could not find that emotion. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Inside, beneath my shell, beneath my mask, I crumbled, and I emptied, and I felt myself falling apart.
How could I do this?
Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
But something was destroying me.
How can I walk down this impossible path that is laid out in front of me?
How can I kill Albus Dumbledore?