Author: XUnFoRgEtTaBlEbAbEX
Title: Machiavellian Designs
Genre: Angst/Drama
Rating: PG-13
Keywords: Draco Malfoy, Voldemort, Muggles
Spoilers: Through "Order"
Disclaimer: "I solemnly swear I am up to no good" – and if you think I own this, I think you need a shrink.
Machiavellian Designs
A Look into the Journal of Draco Malfoy and His Interesting Insights on
Lord Voldemort
How praiseworthy it is for a prince to keep his word and live with
integrity rather than craftiness, everyone understands; yet . . . those
princes have accomplished most who paid little heed to keeping their
promises, but who knew how craftily to manipulate the minds of men. –
Nicolò Machiavelli
But, now, looking back, I might swear that for a second, before death snuffed that proud light, his gaze was pleading, asking me to understand. What, I didn't know. Now, however . . .
It may seem surprising, but I felt no sorrow at Lucius' passing. I had no great love for my father – merely the bonds of loyalty, of family pride, required by the blood we shared, the Malfoy blood that flows in my veins. But I'm no Weasley – I may be many things, and none of them good, but a blood traitor is not one of them.
On the eve of Father's demise, my mother, quiet, unassuming Mother, fiercely bade me swear to never join the ranks of the inexorably stronger Lord Voldemort. "The Dark Lord is doing the world a great good, ridding it of the Mudblood filth that has infested it and would consume it if left unchecked, but don't you get yourself involved! You keep yourself alive! Do you understand? Promise me that!" she cried, clutching my robes to stop me escaping, to stop me avoiding the deep blue eyes to which I could not lie. "Yes, Mother, I swear it," I whispered, meaning every word, with every intention of keeping the promise.
I loved my mother. She was the only person I have ever loved. It was thanks to her that I had a notion of what the word love meant. For years, her only way of expressing that love was through the numerous boxes of sweets she mailed to Hogwarts, the ones I so gloatingly opened at the Slytherin table each and every day. But when our Lord was restored to his body, she showed me the meaning of a mother's love for her child, the sort of love Potter's mother had for him when she took Avada Kedavra to save his sorry hide. She saved me – Mother, my Mother, stopped Him giving me the Dark Mark. She knew of my nightmares, where the Mark was not seared on my arm, but on my very heart. I might despise Mudbloods, yes, but I did not want their blood on my hands. I didn't want to hear their screams in my sleep, as my father did at night. I had no desire to become a murderer. I am coward, I admit. But I was grateful that Mother did not pay for my cowardice, that our Lord valued her bravery enough to let her slip by with a single bout of "Crucio!"
I had no intention of dying for the Cause. I have never in my life come across something worth dying for. I believed Voldemort's credos, yes, but I was not a lunatic, nor a fanatic, as was my Aunt Bellatrix. I do believe that Azkaban unhinged her, destroying any vestige of sanity to be found in her twisted mind. For no sane person would do the things she has done. No person would desire to cause pain the way she does.
I knew all this from a young age, the summer of my sixth year, in fact, but I didn't act upon it until I was seventeen, before beginning my final year at Hogwarts, before the morning that changed it all. . . The image that met my eyes the morning I was to leave for Hogwarts made me more determined to remain detached from the Cause. I saw my mother, cold, lifeless, an air of pure agony about her, her once beautiful face twisted in pain. Killed by the Cruciatus Curse. At the hand of the Dark Lord himself. All because she wouldn't let Him have me. For He no longer accepted her defiant lies that I was too young and weak to take up the banner of the Cause. Lucius had gone to Azkaban for Him and died for Him, but now He wanted me. And my mother wouldn't have it. She wouldn't give me up. So He killed her. All this I was told by one of the servants.
I carried on my life as normally as was possible. I returned to Hogwarts, as though I hadn't a care in the world, as though it didn't matter to me that, for all effects and purposes, I was as alone in the world as Potter was, an orphan. My father had had no living relatives and I couldn't very well turn to the nutcase that was Aunt Bellatrix. She ate, slept, and breathed the Cause. Nothing else was even remotely important. My mother's other sister, Andromeda, had married a Muggle-born and had been blasted off the family tree. I couldn't go to her – anyway, I knew her daughter Nymphadora was a member of the Order of the Phoenix and a friend of Potter's. She would make her mother turn me away at the door, no doubt. Sirius Black, yes, Potter's godfather, was my mother's cousin, but even if the blood traitor was alive, he wouldn't have helped me. I was family, yes, but he would have picked Potter over me every time.
Slowly, relentlessly, the times turned darker. Members of the Order of the Phoenix and their family members were found dead or tortured into insanity at various locations throughout the country. Weasley's brother, the one who worked at the Ministry (what's-his-name . . . Percy) and was estranged from that clan of freckle-faced idiots, was put under the Imperius Curse, and forced to kill the oldest Weasley brother. Then, he was put on trial and sent to Azkaban for it because, of course, the Order didn't know he'd been under the Imperius. I've heard he's gone insane. And so has their mother – I've heard Weasley say that she'll be off to St. Mungo's soon. But while things were bad, it didn't seem so much so until one of my own housemates was affected. Nott, whose father had always stayed outside the circle of Death Eaters, but always been in their good graces and never opposed them, was killed because his father wouldn't throw in his lot with them. It was then that I saw that there was only one way to keep my promise to Mother. And that was to break it. I must join the Cause to save myself.
I rose up in the ranks rather quickly once I joined, probably in some sick form of tribute to my father's memory on Voldemort's part. Then I discovered Voldemort's secret – I discovered that Potter wasn't lying to my father and aunt in the Department of Mysteries. Lord Voldemort really is a half-blood. His mother was a pureblood witch, the last descendant of Salazar Slytherin, but she fell in love with a Muggle named Tom Riddle, who abandoned her and her unborn child when he discovered she was a witch. I learned at last that Voldemort is a hypocrite – he wishes to destroy Mudbloods, though he himself is among their ranks! He casts his own faults and flaws on others, the scapegoat of his cause. For there is only power and those too weak to seek it – annihilating the Mudbloods is merely a vehicle for his rise to power – the end justifies the means!
But it doesn't really matter. Now, as the final showdown between Voldemort and Potter unfolds, as I lie here, dying slowly, but surely, in a pool of my own blood, stabbed with a common Muggle knife by the youngest Weasley, the one who said she was too good to murder, too noble to take another's life, but who didn't hesitate to do so when she saw the Dark Mark on my arm, once she knew that I was one of his, I understand. I finally understand.
The end justifies the means.
- Draco Lucius Malfoy
The Last Battle of the Second Great War, June 1998