Alpha'd by jamethiel

Beta'd by Pidanka and jamethiel

Nothing brings a prince more prestige than great campaigns and striking demonstrations of his personal abilities.

– The Prince, Niccoló Machiavelli

Seawater spattered his face, shrapnel-like, as he sunk his fists into the silt.

Even though his fingernails were cutting sadistic smiles into his palm, the wet sand still slid into the gaps between his fingers; the salty water stinging as it sought for the crescent-shaped weaknesses in his skin.

Bloody typical. One could leave it to the Ministry to arrange for situations that were literally salt water poured over wounds. You would think that they did it on purpose.

Azkaban was always cold – a type of cold which sunk into the marrow and left one wondering if they'd ever feel warmth again – yet in late October, the wind was almost perishing. As the waves hit the shore, the spray barely had time to land on his face before it was whisked away by the wind; leaving lashes of salty residue across his forehead and cheeks.

He had been born to magic. Born to it in a way which witches and wizards from non-magical families could not comprehend. Not in terms of their inability to practice and integrate themselves into the magical world, but there was nothing magical about magic to him. There was no questioning as to why he did 'strange' or 'abnormal' things as a child, because to him they were neither 'strange' or 'abnormal'. He'd never found himself on rooftops, made his clothes shrink, or blown up an aunt, no matter how much he might have wanted to. For him, there had been no confusion between sleight of hand or rabbits appearing out of top hats. Magic was normal to him, like breathing. Yet, like breathing, it controlled his life. Without it, he would perish under the mundane. Magic was not magical, but it was as necessary as the sparks of electricity between his neurons.

Azkaban did something to him. It did something to every person there. Even if you were just an honoured guest, although not to quite the same degree as if you were incarcerated there. It did something to you even if you were only eighteen and not sentenced yet. The motto of 'innocent until proven guilty' was not something the Ministry of Magic practiced. Fuckers.

When he'd been imprisoned, he'd not allowed himself to overthink exactly what was blocking his magic. There had been more dementors then. Their shrouded figures had streamed down the corridors and circled the fortress; so ghost-like and yet so palpable and so affecting that when close, no one could have mistaken them as ghosts.

"Episkey."

Under the silt, he felt his cuts knit together. The warmth of the sudden rush of blood to the injury soldered some life back into his fingers. He closed his fists again and waited for them to grow numb once more.

They hadn't taken his magic this time. He guessed he should be indebted to the bureaucratic bastards, but he could not quite summon the fucks to give.

He'd been whispering that spell since they arrived that morning, checking to make sure he could still do it. That this all wasn't some elaborate ploy and they really weren't going to lock him up again. Bury him in four walls with only an arrow-slit of a window to keep track of the passing months.

He'd scraped his nail down his thumb as they'd entered the fortress, briskly walking over the craggy bridge and into the sunless and dank entrance hall.

Episkey

As he'd sat beside Hermione, on cloister-like chairs, kneeling his elbows on his hands as if in prayer, he'd created a hangnail and peeled the skin back, making his cuticle pink and bloody.

Episkey

Her eyes had been darting from him to the closed chamber door opposite with alarming regularity. If he hadn't known better, he might have said she seemed concerned about him. What an absurd notion. Once she'd decided to join him on this macabre trip to visit the in-law, he had been unable to persuade her otherwise.

He'd made love to her in the early hours of the morning. His mind going as black and as white as the ceiling above him as he slid into her. Her tight little body holding him as he breathed in her scent of jasmine and sweat, his elbows bent on either side of her head as he watched her face in the pale pink light of dawn. Her eyes had been closed, and her mouth parted as she exhaled with every stroke, her warm breath tickling his cheek. Even after all this time, fucking her still made him giddy.

The after-glow had somewhat been ruined when barely ten seconds after he'd finished, she was pushing him off and forcing down that godawful fertility potion. He had been tempted to try again to convince her not to accompany him to Azkaban, however, given her sanguine expression – more in the literal, modern sense than in the Ancient Greek – as she swallowed the last of the potion, he decided he'd like all his limbs to remain attached to his body.

Above the lapping waves and the roar of the sea further out, he couldn't hear his own breathing, but he felt the air freeze his teeth as he sucked in a relieved breath.

By his non-professional estimate – he was a millionaire, not a builder, after all – he had been in a ten by six cell made of grey, dirty bricks that seemed by the chips to have been taken from the rocks on the fortress's shore. Even though he had been incarcerated for months, he had refrained from mapping his days by leaving lines on the wall with some handy piece of chalk, or conceiving great mathematical formulas in his head, or making friends with a convenient Dumas-esque sparrow.

He would say spells and then scream them when nothing happened, bruising his vocal chords until he'd only been able to talk in a savage whisper for days. His dead words would bounce off the walls and receive answering curses from the other inmates, many of which he'd been able to identify. Voldemort had liked to hear his followers scream his name. Noseless motherfucker that he was.

He had grazed his palm on the brick and split his knuckles, but still the magic would not come. His skin had healed over days and weeks; agonizingly slowly, itching as the scabs bumped and cracked and left his skin darker than before; tinged red, where the wound had been.

No, instead he had tracked time by how long the bruises took to fade.

Now he blinked as the sea spray stung his face, feeling his eyes weeping as they expelled the salt in the air. The water washed over his hands, the foam settling on his skin like marbled fat, before dispersing into white specks. The hem of his robes were dipping into the water, and he could feel the moisture between his toes indicating that his boots were not quite as waterproof as the fine London shoe maker had promised. His frustrated bouts of running had strengthened his calves and thighs, but they were beginning to burn as he hunched over the shore and found himself in the cold caress of water.

Episkey

He remembered how his mother had described it as the perfect spell for a young man, who showed a propensity for getting into scrapes on a large and rambling estate, to know. The next one she'd taught him had been Reparo. This was after he'd accidentally dropped one of his father's useless yet expensive jade cauldrons. Jade was not a material that was conducive to potion brewing as it did not conduct heat well, but it was beautiful, finely crafted and from the Ming dynasty, so his father had procured it during a trip to East Asia.

His father had made many of these trips while he was growing up. An extended one to what had been at the time the Soviet Union, where his father had come back with white fox furs, strung with gold and charmed to shimmer in the sun, for his mother and a Ushanka hat for him. A young Draco had sliced off the ears with a clever little tailoring charm, allowing the white blond of his hair to subtly peak from underneath the fur brim. It might not have been the traditional way to wear it, and ruined the point of keeping his ears warm, but one could not account for style. His father had also brought back a Faberge Egg. A goose egg, enameled in pale pink, set with pearls and diamonds, and so badly cursed that anyone who tried to open it would have all the blood in their hands frozen, causing irrevocable frostbite.

That little tchotchke joined the ranks of the exotic and deadly in one of the Malfoy vaults, including a rungu, a wooden throwing club of the Masai Mara, crafted by a shaman to without fail slice open the cranium of whomever the club was thrown at, the string of Caribbean pearls from the early nineteenth century which were said to strangle whomsoever wore them, and the green-gold statue of Brahma, the creator, which if stared at for too long, would cause the onlooker to go blind within the week.

These trinkets had lined the walls of the family vaults or the more deadly ones had been locked in lead-lined boxes, labeled in his ancestor's spidery handwriting to warn future Malfoys of their contents.

It seemed as if his family had spent centuries plundering the earth for items of worth and value and darkness. With the biggest spree being in the nineteenth century in the height of Britain's colonisation. Suddenly their collection was bulked up with shrunken heads from South America, shields from Zulu warriors, and slabs of carved stone taken from the ransacking of ancient Greek temples.

How very muggle of his ancestors.

As they waited outside the door to where, he presumed, his father waited, Hermione had asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this. If his mouth hadn't been as dry as Professor Snape's tone when addressing a first year class, then he might have been able to summon a laugh. As it was, he'd settled for one of his custom smirks.

It was all too late, anyhow, which he'd said to that effect.

"It is a little late for that, my dear." He'd been relieved that his voice hadn't cracked yet. To avoid her eye, he looked down and adjusted the cuff of his tailored robe. He had to look nice for father, did he not.

"We can leave."

There had been something about how she'd said the term 'we' that had him doing what he'd sworn not to do and looking at her. His wife did not often refer to them in any terms of unity; their dynamic worked under more of a 'I' and 'you' and occasionally 'you bastard'. The 'we' had been a nice change. It was a shame that this change had had to occur in a gloomy, drafty room in Azkaban, right when his mind had been so focused on other things.

She had been sat next to him, and the way she'd held herself, so stiff and pensive, reminded him so acutely of their wedding day when they'd been perched outside the Ministry registry office on equally uncomfortable chairs (what was it about government run institutions and bum-numbing furniture) that he almost couldn't bear it. Almost.

"We could?" he'd said and silently hoped she might repeat that 'we' just so he could see the way her mouth formed it.

The dim lighting had drained the colour from her; her robes looking more somber than ever and her hair, normally the colour of caramel swirls, was dyed a dirty brown. She'd been progressively losing her tan – only the lines on her tits and arse betraying how pale she had been – but she was still sun-kissed and bronzed. Yet, here, in this hellish place, he couldn't even take delight in the perfection of his wife's skin. He'd felt a flash of something; white-hot and aggressive. She should not be here; tainted by all this dark madness which he'd kept so well hidden.

"We could leave, Draco."

The pressure that had been building under his diaphragm dissipated.

"No," he'd said, taking a deep breath from his stomach, sucking in the air as if it was rationed, "I cannot."

"If someone were to enquire what I long for the most from the outside world, it would not be my wealth, or possessions, or fine clothes, or even my beloved estate. No. If someone were to ask me this cruelest of questions, then I would have to reply that what I long for most in the world is a proper cup of English tea –"

Draco found it suitably easy to prevent himself from mentioning to his father the existence of his father's very alive wife, who should really be the politically correct answer for what he missed most in prison. Then again, as this was his father, sentenced for life for war crimes and blatant genocide, maybe politically correct was not going to be his top priority.

"– Although, not any old tea in particular."

The Malfoys were, by extension, a vain, frivolous, arrogant and deceptive lot. If you didn't believe in yourself, then who would. This was probably why those esteemed early nineteenth century philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre had named their existentialist philosophy mauvaise foi, translated as 'bad faith', after them. Mauvaise foi, shortened to mal foi, describes the phenomenon in which human beings, under pressure from social forces, adopt false values and disown their innate freedom, hence acting inauthentically. In the true nature of a Renaissance man, he had looked it up one day.

It was therefore no surprise that the appearance of his father disgusted Draco Malfoy to the core of his being. It was also no surprise that Lucius Malfoy seemed to have no idea to which levels of degradation he had sunk to.

Without the social forces, false values, and quite probably a mirror, Lucius Malfoy had been reduced to the most authentic version of himself, which was true inauthenticity.

"Merlin, no," said Lucius with an affected accent. He waved a hand loftily in the air and didn't seem to notice how this movement rattled the manacles around his wrists. "When I lie alone and awake in my cell at night, listening to the screams of my fellow criminals, I can almost taste that first bitter breath of Earl Grey tea."

Okay, maybe his father was more self-aware than Draco was giving him credit for.

"I always thought you favoured English Breakfast in the mornings," Draco said, testing the waters. He resisted the urge to touch his hair – perfectly silky and curling around his collar. It was almost an automatic reaction to his father's hair. It was still long, but that was where the comparison between his present and former self died.

"I did once. However, after so many years of what can only be described as dishwater, I can't help but crave the light, aromatic blend of Earl Grey above the stronger, less complex taste of English Breakfast."

Lucius's hair fell around his face like a curtain. A curtain in a front room. A front room which has been bombed in the past twenty-four hours, and now hung from the wretched remains of a curtain pole, tattered and sadly discoloured curtains. There may also be flecks of blood from the disemboweled remains of the once inhabitants of said front room.

"Heaps of loose leaf Earl Grey, settling at the bottom of the pot like the sand in an hourglass" – Lucius's nostrils quivered as he closed his eyes. It was as if he was able to smell the memory – "then water, boiled, but when poured into the teapot, it should be a temperature of no more than seventy-eight celsius. Anything more and it will burn the leaves, and we couldn't have that. Then comes the steeping" – he raised his hands again, miming holding a teapot, lifting and lowering the imagined china as if encouraging the brewing – "however, we cannot rest it longer than two-hundred and thirty-six seconds."

"We want a shade of honey, not caramel," Draco interjected, like an understudy who had gotten frustrated with the lead and could not help but steal a line.

His father rested the imaginary tea pot carefully on the table as if it was one of the priceless ones from the numerous tea sets at home. Then he opened his eyes slightly too wide for sanity. The whites were tinged yellow and pinkening around the edges where the blood vessels had burst. "Pouring is the easy part, but the next challenge is deciding just how much lemon should be added. I always preferred a thin slice of lemon, slightly condensed so that the juice can more easily distill into the tea." He committed a twisting motion with his hands. The chains rattled again, and Draco saw the welts. The shackles had obviously not been removed for a long time, enough time for the metal to abrade his skin.

"Your mother always had a partiality for wedges, but I always thought it masked the delicate flavour too much. Of course, the mistake so many make is adding milk." Lucius tilted his chin up as if the very idea of adding something as rural as milk was the most ridiculous thing he'd heard that day. "Remember, Son," – his eyeballs rolled down with alarming speed, and Draco was suddenly thrown back to his childhood. Looking up at those cold grey eyes as he was submitted to another Italian Renaissance lecture on the trials of man – "you can always tell the merit of a man by how he takes his tea and his scotch. If it's not straight, then you can't trust him. Then again, even if it is straight, don't trust him."

"We cannot, however, be accused of any other fault except trusting much where we should have trusted little," Draco said, repeating the maxim in the appropriate place.

Lucius gave him a brilliant smile. "Exactly," he said and then added with a swiftness which had once made him such an excellent Machiavellian theorist, "I understand felicitations are in order." His smile became fixed, two rows of teeth, glinting between the greasy, discoloured tendrils of hair. "May you have every joy of her."

It was a particularly nasty remark, even for the Malfoy patriarch.

"We are going to have a baby."

If Lucius had been sipping on the cup of Earl Grey he had so laboriously described, then he would have probably choked on it. There was something delightful and yet distasteful about ruffling his father's composure, even if the man was filthy and chained.

"Yes," Draco said, nodding his head affably, "my wife is quite set on entering the realms of motherhood." He oddly didn't add that this was so she could divorce him.

His father was a traditionalist, which is another term for bigoted motherfucker. Nevertheless, being a bigoted motherfucker, he disliked the concept of divorce. Actually, the magical community was so against the idea of separation that they would often perform a binding spell in the magical ceremony. This antiquated idea had only started to go out of fashion at the end of the last century, but it did explain why there was a distinct lack of divorce in the magical community. Either you came from a two parent household – albeit a household which didn't speak to each other – or your parents were dead; there seemed to be no inbetween.

Lucius appeared to be thinking. His brows were lined, but not furrowed, and he was tapping his fingers lightly on the table. His eyes were bloodshot, but they'd lost the manic expression from earlier. Now he just looked like he'd been on a three day bender and hadn't gotten enough sleep. "They will be half-blood, but this can't be helped. The next magical generation will be –"

Draco steeled himself for his father to utter a word like 'contaminated', 'sullied', or 'filthy, heinous mudbloods', but was pleasantly surprised when his father concluded with, "– less concerned with blood purity. For the family name and reputation, this is a necessary sacrifice."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "Given, as you say, the more liberal mentality of the modern Wizarding World, 'sacrifice' is not necessarily the word I would use."

"Indeed. She is after all a War Hero." Lucius added another two fingers to his tapping, looking as if he was practicing piano scales on the tabletop. "No future Malfoy will experience prejudices in Wizarding society due to any unfortunate past alliances."

If he could call inviting the Dark Lord to play Nazi warfare in their front room as merely an 'unfortunate past'.

"Then you agree," Draco said, keeping his tone convivial but apathetic, "that my wife and I having children contains inevitable positives for the Malfoys."

"Currently so."

"Then you also agree that keeping her alive is a necessary contingent."

"Do you have something to disclose?" Lucius's nostrils quivered. It was as if he was sniffing the air for the scent of the hunt.

Draco could almost hear the baying of hounds. "There have been incidents."

"If someone is threatening your wife, then they are also threatening you."

"For once, I do not believe the malice is pointed in my direction."

"She's a Malfoy," Lucius hissed, something of that old superiority back in the narrowing of his eyes. "Any threat is aimed at us."

"Forgive me, Father, you may have missed this, but over the past decade we have lost something of our political and social prestige. People do not need to make subtle and spectuative threats at us. If anyone has a complaint, then they go directly to the Ministry and report us." Draco bared his teeth in a smile. "The company is raided, I am taken in for questioning, and Witch Weekly runs a special on the trials and tastes of mother's wardrobe. There was a particularly flattering shot of me on the front cover of The Daily Prophet last year when I was accused of dealing in the Dark Arts by a competitor." His jaw stiffened, and he had to take a moment to relax it before he cracked a filling. "So, if I say that my wife is being threatened, is it on her own merits and nothing to do with me."

"As you have so intelligibly articulated, Draco, if your wife's current predicament has nothing to do with the family, then why are you here?"

"I require information."

His father's eyes lit up like a loan shark spying a single mother of three approaching him. "And what do you have to offer for this information."

"Very little."

"Then we have very little to discuss."

"Only," Draco said, letting the word hang between them, "that I keep you informed about your grandchild."

If his hands hadn't been in severe need of a manicure, Lucius would have sat back and examined his nails. As it was, he simply held Draco's gaze. "This joyous occasion may not occur. Malfoys are distinguished in quality over quantity."

Draco shrugged, not breaking eye contact. "I won't deny we are not known for being the most fertile of families. However," and here he couldn't quite suppress the lascivious smirk that besmirched his mouth like a harlot's lipstick, "none of our ancestors tried with a Muggleborn before. Muggles breed like rabbits."

His father's cool demeanour was betrayed by the slight twitch in his left eye. "You are still bargaining with a known uncertainty. I educated you better, son."

"At some point in my life, father, I am going to have a child. This is a simple transaction: you give me the information I require, and I keep you informed about your grandchild. I am not here to negotiate." Well, that was a blatant lie, but he had learnt to spin untruths from the cradle. Draco stood up, smoothing his robes and looking down at his father along the slope of his aristocratic nose. "If you will not assist me, then I must take my leave."

Lucius leaned as far forward as he could without climbing on the table. The chains clinked and then went silent as they were pulled taut. "You need me." His father's bloodless lips pulled back to reveal his equally bloodless gums.

"I do, but only for efficiency's sake. If you prove fruitless, I shall simply spend the next few weekends in our libraries and vaults. You left enough of a record for me to discover all I need to know."

Lucius' voice cracked into a hash, snake-like whisper. "You can't, Draco."

"Yes, Father, I can."

The collapse of anyone is a tragic and curious sight at the best of times; but then breakdown of one's sire is an even more curious one.

Lucius's shoulders sagged, and his arms hung momentary limp under the weight of the shackles. The metal fell, heavily; each chain giving an individual jangle as the links hit the stone floor.

Draco unceremoniously retook his seat. "What do you know about any societies that operate under the symbol of a bull?"

His father's eyelashes fluttered against his sunken cheeks as he answered in a quiet voice, "They call themselves The Cult of Bacchus."

Credit goes to wikipedia for the useful summary of 'mal foi'.

"We cannot, however, be accused of any other fault except trusting much where we should have trusted little," from 'The History of Florence', Niccoló Machiavelli.