Lucius hated that book.

He had a trunk full of things locked away that Narcissa didn't know he had, and now Arthur Weasley, true to his name, was trying to weasel his way in their house with a warrant to find exactly what Lucius swore wasn't there. Mostly the things were trivial, or at least not so illegal that he could really be in any trouble over them. Potion ingredients that had been outlawed only recently, and some cursed family heirlooms that could go to no safer home than a locked case in the Manor. But that damn diary! The Dark Lord had never been a lover of things, and yet he told Lucius so clearly that that musty book needed to be kept safely with everything else that prying eyes should never see. And Lucius, for all his casual attitude in front of his wife, did not feel confident enough to dispose of something his master might one day come looking for. In a way, it was Lucius's most prized possession, and he didn't even know what it was, except to understand that he should not have it.

And worse than all that was the damned stinging on his left arm the entire time Draco was away at school. It didn't feel like it ever had before; it was more like his arm was asleep, except it stayed contained entirely to the margins of the Mark. He was frustrated and confused and by the time summer arrived and Draco was home, he was ungodly hot. The summer raged the way it had when Narcissa was pregnant, and finally by the end of it Lucius could no longer reason his way through anything that was troubling him, and instead swept all the artifacts into a box and thrust it into his son's arms, and led him down Knockturn Alley.

"Your mother can't know a bit of what we're doing," he told Draco as they made the turn out of the sunny shopping arcade. "She doesn't know I have any of this." Draco nodded in return, pleased to have yet another key to the world he was trying to understand, all of his comprehension only strung together from scraps dropped to him. That being said, his father was generally in a bad mood, and he had heard enough already that morning about expectations for the upcoming school year. He plodded along beside him, wondering if lunch would be ready when they got home. He wished he was there then, helping his mother set the table.

The book had not fit in the box with all the vials and other trinkets, so Lucius had stowed it in his breast pocket. There it felt almost alive, he thought, although he did his best to shake the idea out of his head as Draco went on about Harry Potter and all the many rules he was allowed to break.

"Harry Potter will always be allowed to break rules, Draco. We have discussed it many times. Show him you can beat him at Quidditch, which you can, and don't think of him any more than that."

The diary thumped – no, his heart thumped, Lucius reminded himself – and he put his hand up to steady himself.

"Are you alright, Father?" Draco asked him. They were at the door of Borgin and Burkes then, and Draco's worried face peering up touched Lucius.

"Open the door for me, Draco. Good boy. I'm fine. Remember what we discussed about how to behave."

He couldn't give it up. At the end of it all, just as the money was about to be exchanged, Lucius went to withdraw it, but instead made as if he had meant to straighten his cloak clasp. The diary would have to go home with them again.

In later life, when he grew old and repentant, Lucius always thought that giving Ginny Weasley Tom Riddle's diary was the worst thing he had ever done. How much childhood did he strip away from her in an instant, unnoticed by anyone else? Even as it remained impossible for him to say that there was no superiority in pure blood, he knew that there must be a flaw in his to have done such a thing. She was so small, he always remembered, tinier than Draco had been for years before that. He had assumed she would take the book home and notice it and hand it over to her prying father, who would then stumble into a world of trouble for having it suddenly appear in his possession. Or maybe she would throw it in the trash, and do the job Lucius couldn't do himself. But Lucius had never anticipated just how lonely an 11-year-old girl can be.

Lucius dragged Draco into the restroom at The Leaky Cauldron with him while he tried his best to heal his own black eye from the ill-advised brawl with Arthur Weasley.

"Here's another secret for just us men," Lucius told his son. "Hopefully I can –" He swore as the spell missed and stung his cheek instead. This was not the kind of magic one usually performed on themselves.

"I could help," Draco suggested brightly, rummaging in his cloak pockets.

"The last thing I need today, Draco, is both of us going to prison for use of underage magic. I just need to calm down. Everything will be fine if everything just calms down…"

As his father went on muttering to himself in the mirror, Draco slid down into a corner with his pile of books as a seat. His mother would find out about this, of course. There would likely even be photographs of it. He knew that his father was a fool for attempting all this concealment from her, his perfect mother.

As things got worse at Hogwarts that year, Narcissa went into a state Lucius had never seen from her. Every morning she woke up before dawn to write to Draco so he would have his letter from home at breakfast, and she wrung her hands until he wrote back. He never missed a day, although sometimes it came quite late, sometimes even as his parents were getting into bed, with Lucius soothing his wife in his arms as they waited.

"If I saw him turned to stone, I would die," she wept to Lucius after parents received word that the Hufflepuff boy had been petrified. "How are their parents handling it at all?"

"Draco is much too intelligent to fall into these traps, Narcissa. He's more than safe. And you know how Severus watches him."

Lucius kept it to himself that he was sick to his stomach nearly every day, occasionally becoming unable to eat when a particularly bad piece of information escaped the school walls. Again his Mark was flaring, and although he could not piece together how, he had the worst suspicion that his betrayal of his master had led to all this suffering.

He interfered as he always did. Hagrid was an easy scapegoat, Dumbledore less so. And yet Lucius found it so simple – refreshing, even – to slide back into a life of making enemies and greasing palms to get what he wanted. This was for his son's benefit, too. It was not as before, he reasoned, when the things he had done had served only an ideal and not a person.

Narcissa, fraught as she was with worries, noticed little of what he was doing. It was his usual habit to leave the house most days, and as they had grown older, and she became more preoccupied with Draco, she had asked fewer questions when they came back together.

Her careful blindness to Lucius's schemes ended when the Basilisk was slain and the papers filled up with news about Hogwarts. Lucius returned from the school that same morning without his elf and licking his wounds, and he did not find the soothing welcome he once would have after a similarly hard encounter. He thought longingly of the balm of having Narcissa crouch before him when he had protected Andromeda's house, or of her embrace as he waited to be taken by Aurors. But that morning Narcissa only slammed the paper down in front him as he tried to settle in for breakfast.

"You promised me, Lucius, that you would fix everything after the War. You told me there would be no more disgrace. No more front-page news."

Although anyone reading the paper that day would have ignored it for the larger headlines and the relief of safety restored, Narcissa was right that a small blurb under the fold referenced Lucius's removal from the board of school governors.

"Narcissa, it is not my fault that there is an assortment of fools running that school. And may I remind you that if he had attended Durmstrang, we would be in the majority in our sympathies, and I could have easily had all the power –"

"Your obsession with power remains our downfall, Lucius. This is insanity, and think of how damaging it is for Draco to have you making baseless threats and then getting fired for it."

"It isn't as if there was a paycheck his future depended on, Narcissa. I'm telling you, he's better off knowing I don't associate with Mudbloods and blood traitors."

"Please don't try to convince me that our son is any better off for you having made threats to the most well-liked in society in order to have his headmaster removed."

And then she did something neither of them had ever dared to do before, and picked up the newspaper, and hit him with it very firmly on the arm. Of course it didn't hurt him, but Lucius sat back in his chair as she stormed off, defeated again.

Ahhh I loved writing this chapter because I think Lucius's role in the Chamber of Secrets opening is really so forgotten and the entire untold backstory fascinates me.

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