Lucius Malfoy Saves the World
X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X
AN: I've wondered why Lucius and his father before him joined up in a movement led by someone else (given their egomania). I tried to sift through the canon and make a case for why Lucius did what he did. I could not. Instead, I will make the case for why Lucius might want to finish what a fifteen-month-old Harry Potter started.
X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X
Lucius sat in his secret room and looked at the small black book in his hand. He turned it over and saw the words embossed into the leather: T.M. Riddle. He felt the pain, the throbbing, in his left forearm increase the longer he held the book.
He knew what he should do with the book: he should restore his master. He had waited more than a decade for his master to return, but it hadn't happened yet. He had met with Nott and Rowle to discuss what they knew a few days ago. Lucius could use this diary which he had been entrusted to hold to bring back his master – if he believed what the Dark Lord had told him so many years ago.
"Lucius, I require a service," the charismatic man had said.
"Yes, my Lord."
"You don't even wish to know what I require?"
"Please tell me," Lucius had responded.
"You live behind secure wards now that you are Head of the Malfoy Family?"
"Two hundred years of wards overlaid, my Lord."
The Dark Lord nodded. "There is a possession of mine, an old school diary. I have enchanted it in a particular way. This news of a prophecy has me unsettled, Lucius. Should I disappear for a time – should that fool Dumbledore claim to have slain me – then you must take this book and use it."
"What does it do, my Lord?"
"As I said, I have enchanted it. You ensure it passes to a minor pureblood – someone unimportant – and put a compulsion on it. The pureblood must begin to write in the diary. Someone of decent to exceptional magical ability, not a squib. The more the pureblood writes in the diary the more powerful the summoning ritual will be…."
"Summoning?"
The Dark Lord had glared at his servant. "I cannot be killed, Lucius. But I can be captured. If they claim I am dead, they will not have a body to show. What will have happened is that this prophecy will have allowed them to trap me. Imprison me. This book will drain the life of a pureblood to summon me out of whatever warded prison they have created. Even Nurmengard."
Lucius had been stunned. It had sounded like a work of exceptional genius. "I will, my Lord. I will."
"If you gift it to a school child, there could be an added benefit."
"Yes?"
"The process, if done under the Hogwarts wards, where that incompetent pretends to be a wise educator, the process will summon the ultimate protection left there by Salazar Slytherin."
Lucius had nodded, remembering the legends. "The mudbloods will die, my Lord?"
"You understand very well, Lucius. Very good."
"Might I ask how you learned all of this, my Lord?"
The Dark Lord had looked at his servant before nodding. "The magic retained on this island is nothing compared to what was known – what was done – in ages past, Lucius. I spent four years in Egypt in my youth reconstructing some of the most ancient magics that are still documented. This enchantment I salvaged from the abyss, renewed it."
"I understand," Lucius had said.
He sat in his secret room and turned the book over. He did not understand it at all. He had feared to retrieve this book in 1981 and use it. He had almost done it in 1984. He promised to do it when his father, Abraxus, passed in 1990. Still, it resided in this secret room under Malfoy Manor.
Now he needed to do something with it. It was more than a decade. If the Dark Lord were in a warded cell, he would be furious.
Lucius set the diary on the stone floor and began looking through the secret papers his father had kept. They had been removed to this chamber after the dementia set in and before the final end. Everyone was told it was dragon pox, but that was a less painful truth than the real one.
His father had believed in magical contracts, Lucius now remembered. All of his papers seemed to be on contract paper. Lucius read a copy of his betrothal agreement to Narcissa; he read the paper that purchased twenty percent of the Daily Prophet; he read…he read a contract with a man named Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Lucius read it a second time, then a third, and finally a fourth time.
He had been a fool not to look through these papers earlier. It had been hard losing his father, his mind gone a decade before his body followed, but Lucius had suffered so very much by not knowing about this particular contract.
Lucius read the words out loud in the secret room. "The House of Malfoy will provide material support to the Knights of Walpurgis and any successor organizations in exchange for an equal responsibility in leading the organization. So long as the Knights are dedicated to preserving and enhancing pureblood culture and hegemony, the House of Malfoy will allow its heirs to serve the cause as co-equals with the House of Slytherin. The House of Malfoy shall never serve the House of Slytherin, but will cooperate with it to achieve greater heights for all English purebloods."
His father had signed. Tom Marvolo Riddle had signed.
Lucius looked at the back of the diary again. T.M. Riddle, the name embossed in the leather. Voldemort had signed.
Why was Voldemort still alive if he had broken this contract? Lucius was not co-equal with Voldemort; he was a marked servant. Lucius ran the contract through a battery of detection spells. It was the Certification Charm that explained what had happened: someone had placed a powerful spell, perhaps a Confunding Spell, on the contract parchment.
When Voldemort marked Lucius, the contract had activated. But it made the wrong signatory pay: Abraxus Malfoy had lost his mind for a crime perpetrated on the House of Malfoy. Voldemort had betrayed the Malfoys – he had always planned to betray the Malfoys.
Lucius wanted to scream; he wanted to rail against his one-time master. But he needed a plan.
He finished looking through his dead father's contracts, looking for more of Voldemort's fingerprints. He found two further contracts – one spelling out a specific annual tithe in exchange for an equal value of stolen magical devices and spell books; the other an agreement for the House of Malfoy to purchase an old muggle house in a town called Little Hangleton – which further infuriated him, but added nothing to a plan.
He walked over to the large device on the other wall. It had been in the family vault since the early 1970s and was perhaps the most illegal enchanted object Lucius now controlled. It had no name, as it was one of a handful built by a mad German wizard in 1757, shortly before he was killed.
It could force the magic out of any magical creature or any wizard. The magic could be reused, perhaps to set a permanent enchantment on something. Lucius had ripped the magic out of bowtruckles and crups just to test the device. He had used the magic to add new layers to the wards of Malfoy Manor.
Now he stuck the diary in the device. He touched the runes at its base in the correct order.
He felt the process begin.
Eventually the magic was pulled from the pages, from the leather cover, from the binding. The shredded leavings landed under the magic press while the ball of pure energy remained trapped inside the wooden frame.
Eventually a face appeared out of the energy. A young man's face, in pain, scowling. Lucius recognized it: the Dark Lord at a young age.
"What are you?" Lucius asked.
The mouth opened, but no words issued from the strange magical occurrence.
"You are the Dark Lord, aren't you? Part of him?"
The mouth closed.
"Thank you for agreeing to power the wards of the Malfoy Manor. Do a good job for us."
Lucius stuck a hunk of rock near the trapped ball of energy and pressed a rune. The energy fled from the magic press and remained within the large stone.
He opened the trap door up into the drawing room and pushed the stone out first. He climbed out, resealed the secret room, and put all the carpets back in place.
Lucius took the stone to the ward room and filled it into place. He looked at the charms and saw that the new layer of defenses was quite strong.
He went searching for his wife. He got into the longest hallway in the Manor and called out "Narcissa?"
"Lucius, I'm on the patio."
He walked through the double hung French windows. "There was a book that was part of your dowry, dear. A book from the Black Library. Do you remember where it went?"
"Abraxus wanted it. Did he stick it in the library?"
"Dobby!"
A wary house elf appeared. "Yes, Master?"
"Search the library. There may be a book in there originally from the Black Library. It is perhaps four centimeters thick, covered in black leather. Title is… Narcissa, do you remember?"
"No."
"It has no author," Lucius said. "No credited author. And the title is…right, the title is Übel Atmet." Evil Breaths.
"I will be looking," the house elf said before it disappeared.
"What's this all about?"
"A horrible realization, dear. I think my father made a bargain with the Dark Lord. I think I was lied to for years. I think my father was killed by the Dark Lord…."
"What?"
"Yes."
"What will you do when he returns?"
Lucius nodded. "I suppose I have to ensure he never does, my dear. Never."
"He was beyond all of us, Lucius. Be sane for a moment."
"I have a clue about what he did. That's why I need that book."
"Don't drag our son into this."
"He's at Hogwarts."
"No, he's on the Express right now. He'll be back in a few hours."
Lucius rubbed at his temples. "It slipped my mind."
"I know."
"I will go with you to fetch him."
"As you should," Narcissa said. "Keep your plotting to your locked office, alright?"
"Yes."
They adjourned to an early, languid lunch. Narcissa picked the menus and Lucius knew better than to comment negatively on them. Still, he did not like a dish composed exclusively of hummingbird tongues. They were like tiny little worms and quite disgusting.
As Lucius was breaking the caramelized sugar coating on his pudding, Dobby popped into the room with a leather book in his little hands. He shoved it at Lucius. The wizard ripped the volume away from the creature.
"Begone."
The elf disappeared.
Narcissa looked up from her grapefruit half and shook her head. "Not in the dining room."
"This could be the answer…."
"Which can wait until after pudding."
Lucius set the book on his legs so it was out of her sight. He finished his pudding in four bites and waited for his wife to finish her dainty bites of the grapefruit.
His fingers began to drum on the book. Patience was not a Malfoy virtue.
Finally Narcissa set down her grapefruit spoon. "You have an hour before we need to fetch Draco."
"I shall meet you in the front hall then."
He walked as fast as he could to his office. He closed and locked the door and began to read the handwritten volume. It was in German, but Lucius was proficient in four languages.
It took him only twenty minutes to find the right term: horcrux. He almost lost his lunch from the reading he did. Slivering a soul; accepting the madness the process guaranteed; immortality at the cost of everything else.
It made it much harder to destroy the man who'd betrayed Abraxus Malfoy.
There was a way, of course.
He got as far as he could before one fifteen rolled around. He locked the vile little book in his desk and met his wife in the foyer.
"Any solutions?"
Lucius looked paler than normal, but he did nod. "I have an idea what that madman did. But unwinding the magic he used is not easy, my dear."
"Take your time; do it right."
"Until today I would have said that the Malfoys do everything the right way. Now…now…I find I will take your advice, wife."
"Good." She disapparated.
Lucius followed behind her.
They arrived, by longstanding tradition, in a small room in King's Cross Station. They walked, hand in hand, toward Platform 9 ¾ to wait for the arrival of the train.
It was early by fifteen minutes. Draco was one of the last ones off. He had a scowl on his face.
"Everything alright, Draco?" Narcissa asked.
"Potter."
"Oh."
The little blond boy nodded, but said nothing else. He knew his mother would take great pains to tease the answer out of him later.
"Let's get your trunk," Lucius said. "I'm sure you'll be glad to be back at the Manor."
"Hogwarts is awful," Draco said.
"We'll talk when we get home." Lucius walked off and collected his son's trunk and then led all three of them to the apparition point. Narcissa disapparated with the trunk while Lucius took his son.
They adjourned to the solarium. The house elves promptly brought in chocolate covered biscuits and tea. It wasn't time for High Tea just yet, but a little snack was in order for Draco after such a long journey.
"So, my son, what was your favorite class?" Lucius asked after Draco helped himself to a biscuit.
The boy finished chewing his snack before responding, as anyone of manners should. "Potions."
"Really?" Lucius asked. Draco was rather nervous out of doors so it surprised him that his son enjoyed chopping up dead things and boiling them.
"Yes, Professor Snape is a good teacher, better than that old bag McGonagall."
Narcissa smiled. She too had a Transfiguration Mastery, but she recognized she had some way to go to match wits with Dumbledore or McGonagall.
"How were your Transfiguration marks, then?" she asked her son.
Draco picked up another biscuit in lieu of answering. It was, of course, an answer in itself.
"How was your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?" Lucius asked. He was a school Governor and had been trying to argue for better instructors for the last three years.
"Useless, then he fled the school…."
Lucius frowned. He hadn't heard any of this. "Who told you that?"
"He wasn't at the last few meals, just gone. There was a rumor going around that he was a Dark Wizard, that Potter had killed him somehow. But Potter can't even tie his own laces."
Lucius wanted to explore this obsession with Potter, who was probably just an average young wizard, a half-blood. But he needed to know about Quirrell first.
"Did you learn anything from him?"
Draco shook his head. "He stuttered all the time and stank of garlic. A half-trained Cornish pixie would have done a better job."
"I see," Lucius said. "I think it's time I had a chat with the Headmaster about this."
"He's completely round the bend."
"He was then, too, when I learned Transfiguration from him."
Lucius smiled at his heir and left the room. Narcissa would pick his mind clean of whatever information he did have. Lucius walked to the main closet and fetched out his most imposing, formal robe.
He had a long talk – a long overdue chat – with Dumbledore, that slippery arse.
He returned home that evening long past the dinner hour. He went into the formal parlour and sat. Narcissa joined him a few minutes later.
"Draco's out feeding his Abraxan."
"That's good."
"How did your visit go?"
Lucius blinked and sighed. "Dumbledore's still in charge, but barely."
"Oh?" That sounded like good news to Narcissa.
"I caught him before he went off on vacation. We talked, then I yelled, and he tried to dismiss me. I called an emergency Governors' meeting and forced him to explain about Quirrell. Somehow the Dark Lord was inhabiting him…."
"What?"
"My reaction exactly."
Narcissa sat for a few minutes before she nodded.
"Apparently Potter really did have a confrontation with Quirrell, killed him somehow. Dumbledore was especially opaque on the mechanism. Clearly self-defense, but Dumbledore was trying to keep it quiet."
"You pushed to oust him?"
"Didn't have to. Bertie Tobbler made the motion. Failed by one vote. Dumbledore knows the score, I'd bet."
"What are you going to do about the Dark Lord? You bear his mark but also know he's not dead."
Lucius nodded. "He needs to pay for what he did to my father."
"He's a brilliant wizard without moral compunction."
"I need to harden myself, make myself even more horrible."
"Don't forget you need to come back to me and Draco at the end."
"I will," Lucius said. "I will."
He retired to his office, ordered a meal from Dobby, and began scratching ideas into parchment. He barely noticed when the food arrived. He needed more information on horcruxes, on how to destroy them.
He would see Fudge in the morning and get a pass to visit with an Unspeakable. That was the place to start.