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Chapter Sixty-Five: Lucius and Draco

Lucius permitted himself a single cold smile as he folded the letter. Yes, it made sense that the family of the Death Eater who'd hurt his wife had hidden themselves thoroughly the moment tidings of the battle on the equinox came to them. They would have known that, even dead, their son had made the rest of them targets of an angry Malfoy. That was why it had taken his people so long to find them. But they'd been located now, huddling in a tiny house in Finland, and Lucius had only to contact someone who could study the house thoroughly, then create a Portkey for it and send it to him at the Manor.

Of course, he hadn't yet decided on which of several spells he wanted to use on that family. He had pulled books from the shelves, but as time passed and the prey proved harder and harder to locate, Lucius's estimate of how much they needed to pay for hurting his wife had risen. The first three tomes he had looked through were not painful enough. He reached for a book that had no title, but which every Malfoy worth his blood had looked through by the time he was fourteen or so. Lucius had done that, and so had his father.

Draco did not.

Lucius felt his mouth tighten, and shook his head. It was unworthy of him to let thoughts of his son disturb his pleasure in vengeance. Abraxas, his father, would have put the thoughts aside in a moment, opened the book, and learned the spells. Then he would have turned his attention to writing a letter to make sure his son obeyed him.

Of course, Abraxas had never had the same problems with Lucius that Lucius did with Draco. Lucius had been trained in the dances, and how to be a worthy heir, from the time he was three years old. With Draco, Lucius hadn't begun training him properly until he was seven. Part of that was at Narcissa's insistence—she claimed they had to wait and be sure that Draco was psychologically normal, that he hadn't inherited the Black madness—but Lucius knew some of it was his own fault, too, his own leniency.

And he had a son who was weak because of it, far too inclined to share his emotions with the world, and involved in choosing a partner that he actually seemed to need, rather than, as Lucius and Narcissa had done, making the choice because each one of them wanted the other.

Enough. I said that I would not think about him now.

He flicked the titleless book open to a page he knew well, but which nevertheless changed every time he read it. The writing had powerful spells covering the description of other spells, so that Lucius, depending on his mood, would find more painful Dark Arts written there when he wanted to cause pain, more complicated incantations when he wanted a challenge.

He'd just started to read the description of a spell that promised to split the victim's body in half and then heal it again without killing them when he heard a short trill of phoenix song. Lucius turned his head inch by inch, eyes narrowed. That bloody communication spell that Rosier-Henlin had invented was a nuisance, and were it not for the fact that it had great advantages in battle, Lucius would have refused to let it be cast on him.

"Father," said Draco's voice a moment later from his wrist. "I need to speak to you. May I Floo home in half an hour?"

Lucius felt his eyebrows rise. It was Tuesday, and Draco should have been in class. "Speak to me on what matter, Draco?" he asked.

There was a pause, and then his son's voice spoke, not trembling, though Lucius thought it would. "I think it's a matter that both of us need to hear me speak of face-to-face," he said. "If that is well with you, Father."

Lucius bared his teeth. So it comes to this. Well. He had thought that his disapproving letters would sting Draco into a confrontation at some point. He had simply expected it to come in the form of a whiny, sulky letter, at which point he could chide Draco for exposing their family's private affairs to the posts. For Draco to risk facing him like this was unusual, but not so unpredictable. It only meant he would crash into the floor much harder than he would by letter. Lucius knew his son, and he knew that Draco was not his equal, and he knew that Draco thought he was. "Come ahead, Draco," he said smoothly. "I will be in my library when you arrive."

"Thank you, Father."

His voice died, and Lucius knew the communication spell had ended. He put the book down and strode briskly from the library, finding Narcissa in the small blue antechamber she favored on the second floor of the Manor. She put down the letter she'd been writing and raised her eyebrows at him.

Lucius bent, kissed her once, and then said, "Draco is coming home to face me. I request and require that you stay out of this, my love. Draco has some hard lessons to learn."

As he expected, Narcissa's face went pale—she had been hoping that Draco would grow for a few more years before he tried this, Lucius knew; she understood their son's weaknesses as well as he did, though she termed them strengths—but she nodded. She knew that Draco was more Malfoy than Black, and besides, he bore Lucius's name and was heir to Lucius's fortune and house and land. If he had been a Black, then he would have had to face her at some point. "Very well, Lucius," she whispered. "I will remove to the third floor." She picked up her parchment and quill. Lucius observed indulgently that her hands shook. Well, she was a fond mother, and Draco was her only child, and this was the first time he had decided on facing his father. When the second time came—as the second time would have to come, because Lucius would defeat his son in this one—she would be composed and calm.

As she was about to step out of the room, he caught a glimpse of the letter she was writing, and frowned inquiringly at her. Narcissa nodded to him. "No book in the libraries portrays the consequences of a broken threefold oath clearly," she said. "I am writing to the healers at St. Mungo's, from behind my Gillyflower persona, to ask what they know of it."

Lucius felt his mouth tighten again. He could hardly think of Harry without contempt, either, lately. Narcissa had told him that Harry had become heir to the Black fortune last night, and before that, he had caused the oath to recoil upon Narcissa by killing Bellatrix. The boy meant well, but he was too young for the kind of power he wielded. Lucius had started thinking he was strong enough to bear it after their battle for Woodhouse, and again after the death of his phoenix at Midwinter, but his opinion was declining again.

"Good luck to you in finding the truth," he told Narcissa, knowing that the fact he bothered to say the words at all would tell his wife how sincerely he meant them.

Narcissa held his eyes, the strong woman he loved again, and not the mother who had just learned that her son was coming home to face his father. "I will do more than find the truth," she said. "I will confront it."

Lucius nodded approvingly, and moved aside so she could go upstairs. Then he returned to his own library, glancing at the clock above the fireplace. It was twenty minutes until Draco would arrive home.

He could think of his son without resentment now, even with a little pride. Draco was following a family tradition, one that relatively few purebloods still preserved; it was kept so private that the Malfoy confrontations were the only unbroken line Lucius knew of in the last hundred years. (It was possible that it might have happened in the Black family as well, but Lucius didn't know if he could count Sirius Black's confrontation with his parents at sixteen, which had resulted in the absolute breaking of both his parents and Sirius's running away and disowning, as one or not). It had been far more common in the old days when most pureblood patriarchs or matriarchs still controlled their families almost completely, when it had been common to weave spells around the cradles to make a child's disobedience impossible for the first ten years of his or her life. At a certain point, the spells, placed when the heir was so young, would weaken, and the family head would see how long it took the child to notice and come to face them. It might take multiple confrontations, but ultimately the child would win and prove himself or herself worthy—or be rejected, and another child chosen or adopted as heir. In the very oldest traditions, the child had killed the family head, and so power had passed, or been killed in the rejection.

Lucius wrinkled his nose. That was a barbaric practice, the way Light purebloods thought of Dark inheritance practices in general. In the centuries when wizarding families still had children regularly dying before they reached ten years old, poisoned by powerful Dark artifacts or by their enemies, killing one's potential heir was a waste. The Malfoys had been one of the first families to adopt a different sort of confrontation, to see if the heir could make the family head respect him and declare him worthy.

Lucius had won his first confrontation with his father at sixteen—a good thing, because Abraxas had died of dragon pox the next year. Lucius had been ready, calmly, to take control of the family at the same time as he was initiated as a Death Eater.

And now Draco, callow and even younger than Lucius had been, not trained in the same way and far too emotional, imagined that he could face his father and win.

It was almost…charming, really.

Narcissa tried, but she couldn't write. She put down the quill and looked out the window at the sky. She felt nerveless, but no tears would come. She was not quite so abandoned to propriety as to weep, especially when the confrontation hadn't even begun yet and she didn't know what the consequences to her son would be.

She hoped it would not come to spells. Lucius was more than Draco's equal there, and he would not hesitate to use spells that affected Draco quite severely—perhaps ones that would change his memories, or even deage him a year. Narcissa knew Lucius's father had been prepared to use such a spell on him. Lucius loved Draco, but it was a fierce love, not a comfortable one. In the name of making his heir stronger, he would do something that might make Draco incredibly angry when he learned of it, so that Draco's fury would give him a better chance of winning his second confrontation with Lucius, and ultimately strengthening the Malfoy family.

Narcissa wondered when she had stopped believing that the survival of the family was more important than the survival of any one specific individual. Perhaps when one of her sisters turned out to have inherited the Black madness and the other ran away to marry Ted Tonks, she thought. Or perhaps the night that Sirius rose against his parents in revolt, and Narcissa had gone to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place see Aunt Capella screaming in mute, helpless pain, her brain wracked by contrasting compulsions that she could neither obey not disobey. That wouldn't have happened had his parents not tried to make Sirius into the perfect model of the Black heir—had they not been so horribly afraid of his compulsion gift, so much stronger than their own. For that matter, Narcissa wondered what would have happened had her own mother done something besides simply accept that Bella's madness was incurable, or that Andromeda was irredeemable because she had first resisted the pureblood dances when she was eight—done something besides pin all her hopes on Narcissa to carry her family's future.

If you believed that in truth, her conscience whispered at her, you would go down there and stop this confrontation.

But she could not. If she had married someone with the last name of Black, she would have the right to interfere. But both Lucius and Draco were Malfoy by blood, not just name, and Narcissa could no more step into this testing than she could observe the ritual that would mark Draco as the Malfoy magical heir—if Lucius ever performed it.

So perhaps she did believe that family was more important than one specific individual, after all.

Or perhaps she simply mistrusted her judgment sharply, after realizing how much her broken oath could cost her and how much of the cost would be her own fault, and knew that neither her husband nor her son would thank her for the interference.

Restlessly, she put aside the letter to St. Mungo's, and began working on one to Harry instead. She still blamed him somewhat, but she didn't blame him as much as she had before, and she wanted to say that, and the mixed emotions suited her mood at the moment.

She felt the flare of the Floo downstairs a few moments later. Draco had arrived.

Draco stepped out into the antechamber and handed his formal cloak to the house elves. In reality, he hadn't had much reason to wear a formal cloak, but he'd known that things had to be done properly, and so he'd changed into the kind of simple, elegant clothes his father would have expected to see him wearing if he'd just come home from a long journey.

He hesitated a moment, drawing up his courage and breathing it in great, rolling puffs of freezing air through himself. For a Gryffindor, maybe, courage was symbolized by fire and a hot temper. Not for a Malfoy. A Malfoy's courage was ice, the deep ice of the south, which never melted and never cracked no matter what the pressure of the sun. When Draco stepped forward again, he was calm, and cold, and as ready as he would ever be.

He moved through the house in a surreal state. It wasn't far from the fireplace he'd come through to his father's library, but it seemed to take hours to walk the distance. The walls bent and warped around him. Draco could feel his own fear struggling beneath the ice of his composure like a trapped seal.

And I think that Father is unbalancing me on purpose.

Draco narrowed his eyes. He touched his wand, resting in his robe pocket, and whispered, "Finite Incantatem," under his breath. The odd stretching sensation vanished, and the walls went back to their normal places. Draco snorted lightly, and wondered if this was a spell that Lucius had cast to test him, or one in place on the Manor walls, prepared to spring into motion when any heir came to face the head of his or her family. Draco wouldn't have put it past his father, who had said much in his recent letters about how Draco was too weak, and too disobedient.

Does he think that obeying him will make me strong?

But Draco knew the channels his father's thinking ran in, like deep, icy rivers. An heir was supposed to gather strength in silence, in quiet, obeying faultlessly until the moment he was ready for the challenge of asserting his own will. Draco had not shown, at least to his father, that he had the necessary strength, and he had disobeyed him in several matters, large and small, since Walpurgis Night.

Lucius's latest letter had contained the sentence: I find myself wondering if you are a true Malfoy, Draco, given how you have done many things that are unworthy of us.

Draco knew he wasn't accusing Narcissa of infidelity. But Lucius could doubt Draco's fitness all he liked, and would, until Draco proved himself worthy. Lucius loved him, Draco knew, but it was love as high and cold and lofty as an eagle's love for the air—love like an iron fist. And he had done the best he could, and Draco had still turned out—the way he turned out.

I'm half Black, too, though. And the Blacks have—not weakness, but a different kind of strength.

Draco halted outside the door of his father's library. He envisioned to himself why he was doing this. For a moment, he had thought of only speaking the reasons his father would want to hear, but no, that was false, to both himself and his purposes. He was going to win this confrontation with what he was, not an icy mask. Besides, Lucius would be perfectly within his rights to disinherit Draco if he found out later that his son had won through a trick, or lied about his purposes in demanding to be made Malfoy magical heir; he had told Draco often enough about what happened to heirs who used compulsion or subtle spells to cheat their parents into giving them their legacy.

This is probably one of the few points in his life where my father values honesty, Draco reflected, as he gathered all his strength. He's opaque the rest of the time. But today, I get to see the real Lucius Malfoy, as much as he gets to see the real Draco.

The idea made a frisson of excitement run through him. He reached out and rapped firmly on the library door.

His father's voice answered, absolutely calm and absolutely level. "Come in, my son."

Draco opened the door and stepped into the confrontation.

Lucius turned and regarded Draco. He noted with distant approval that Draco wore the fine shirt and trousers of a well-traveled heir returning from a journey, not his school uniform. He would not have put it past Draco to come in like that, despite all his own training, and Narcissa's.

"Close the door, and sit down," he said, the first of many tests. Whether Draco obeyed or not, that would tell Lucius something about what he was here for.

Draco shut the door, but did not sit down. "I would rather face you on my feet, Father," he said.

Lucius nodded. This confrontation would likely be short. Draco was too raw, too open, and didn't trust himself enough to sit down while Lucius remained standing, as of course he would. There were cracks in his composure already. "Of course, Draco. Tell me why you came." Those words would have begun the ancient ritual among the old wizarding families, the one where only one wizard or witch would leave that room alive. Abraxas had used the same words to him, though they had not designed to kill each other. And Lucius had given the proper ritual response. He hoped Draco would.

"I want you to make me Malfoy magical heir," said Draco bluntly.

Lucius concealed a sigh. Well, there will be other times. When he faces me again, perhaps he will use the words. "I will not do that," he said. "And you know why not. I have my purposes answered in you remaining as you are. You are not strong enough or worthy enough of the title."

Draco lifted his head as if hearing a distant horn call. Lucius didn't know what to call the expression that came over his face next, except weakness. He was not closed enough. "I have inherited a magical gift from Julia Malfoy," he said. "I went through the ritual to summon her, and she gave me her gift of empathy. You know that. You watched the scene in the Pensieve this past summer."

Lucius nodded again. "And again I say, you are not strong enough or worthy enough of the title," he murmured. "The gift of empathy will prevent you from ever Declaring for Dark, Draco. It has made you weak, made you show your emotions more frequently and more often. And while it might be considered a technical inheritance from the Malfoy family, since you did receive it directly from a Malfoy ancestor, that does not mean I need make you my magical heir."

"I'm not your magical heir," said Draco steadily. "I know I'm not. Your soul and mine don't resonate, Father."

"With as weak as you are, I would be worried if they did," Lucius shot back, and waited to see if that would break his son.

Draco's lip curled. A most peculiar look came into his eyes. "How old were you the first time you cast the Killing Curse, Father?"

"Seventeen," said Lucius. "During my initiation into the Dark Lord's ranks. You know this, Draco."

"I was fifteen." Draco took a step forward. "I cast it on that werewolf, Greyback's mate, in the Woodhouse battle. I did it a full two years younger than you, Father. I found and summoned the hatred and the strength to do so, and survive. Will you still say that I am weak, Lucius?"

Not bad, Lucius thought. Draco was testing him now, calling him by his name, and bringing up a comparison in which Lucius might suffer, if not for other, contrasting circumstances. But he was still going to lose.

"Yes, I will," said Lucius. "For this reason. I completed my initiation and accepted it as the Dark Lord purposed that I should do. You needed comfort, Draco. I saw your face afterwards. You did not accept the Killing Curse as something justified, a spell that you always knew you would need to cast. You collapsed into your boyfriend's arms as soon as we were away from Hogwarts, I trust?" He kept his tone coolly inquiring.

Draco laughed, a sound like lightning. "Lucius, do you still think that bowing to Voldemort made you strong?"

Lucius stiffened. Of all the topics he had thought Draco might bring up in this confrontation, he had not realized he would dare to touch on Lucius's days as a Death Eater.

"Careful, my son," he said, feeling freezing anger spread over him, and self-resentment that he had shown even that faint sign of his shock in the rigidity of his muscles. "Oh, be careful. I accepted the role of lieutenant to the most powerful Dark Lord the world has seen in generations. He was stronger than Grindelwald, and more successful. The Malfoys have followed Dark Lords when they appeared, save for those times when a Lord-level wizard appeared among their own family. I held a position that did me honor. You will not dare to cast aspersions on it."

"Oh, but I can, and I will," said Draco, moving a step forward. "If it did you such honor, Lucius, why not hold to your loyalty to him, the way that Aunt Bella did, and go to Azkaban for his sake? Instead, you pretended that you'd been under the Imperius Curse the entire time. You told me that as I grew up, too, and it took Harry persuading me that you'd been a willing Death Eater to make me see sense. So, you see, I never believed that you were an honorable follower of the Dark Lord. First I thought you were a victim, and now I'm just disgusted at the contradiction."

Lucius found it hard to breathe for a moment. Then he snapped his teeth, and said, "Malfoys have always adapted, always survived. I did what I had to do to remain alive and free. The lesser wizards are jealous of us, Draco. I would have been Kissed by Dementors, not merely sent to Azkaban, if they had believed I was a willing Death Eater."

"And you could have told me that story, and I would have accepted it," said Draco. "Why did you tell me that you were a victim, though, Lucius? Why did you want your son to believe that?" He tilted his head to the side, a gesture that Lucius knew he'd inherited, or copied, from Narcissa. "Could it be that you didn't want me to know that you'd tortured children? Killed a family that included a baby, instead of just taking out the one Bones wizard dangerous to you? Could it be that you were ashamed?"

"You would have betrayed the secret," Lucius said between gritted teeth. And when had that happened? He forced his jaw to relax. "Children will chatter. I wished to keep the story consistent."

"I never chattered, and you know that very well," Draco said.

"You were a spoiled, indulged child, Draco, and you would have told someone else the secret to make you seem more important than you were," Lucius snapped. "And yes, I do affix a large portion of the blame to myself for making you that way."

Draco chuckled at him, and Lucius was reminded of his father's laugh. He narrowed his eyes. He had seen little of Abraxas in Draco before. Where had this piece come from?

Of course. He's been keeping some of his strength hidden.

But that clashed with what Lucius knew of Draco—that he was too open, too vulnerable, too weak, to inherit as Malfoy magical heir, though Lucius had no other choice for a blood heir. This strength was a contradiction to everything Draco had shown so far.

Which means that this is the mask. I need only strike back strongly enough, and it will shatter.

Draco was surprised at how easy it was to drive his father in circles. Did Lucius really think he'd learned nothing from him? Draco had been Sorted into Slytherin for a reason. Just because he'd never said these things didn't mean he'd never thought them. He had, and sometimes he had felt a festering discontent when he looked at his father, but love and pragmatism both had kept him quiet.

He watched his father's face, though, and saw determination there, as if Lucius was settling back on his haunches. He decided that Lucius had had a chance to get used to this tactic, and was getting ready to strike back.

Draco braced himself in turn, and called up every bit of determination, every reason he was doing this, and put them all together into a great wall, solid as a mountain, that his father would not destroy no matter how hard he tried.

And he did try.

"You are a spoiled child, Draco," said Lucius, his tone as fatherly as it ever got. "You are too young for such a responsibility as you demand from me. Even your means of asking shows it. Tell me, Draco: why are you doing this?"

Draco held his eyes. "Because I want to," he said. "Because my gift of empathy has changed, and it's now the ability to possess people." He paused to watch and enjoy as shock flooded Lucius's face, however briefly. "That means that I can Declare Dark if I wish. And I know that possession also has flourished in the Malfoy line, once or twice, so I am still the inheritor of the magic of my family."

"You have not inherited the magic of your ancestors directly," said Lucius. "And you are still not my magical heir."

Draco sneered at him. "And I know that that doesn't matter, Lucius," he said. "There are rituals that will allow a wizard to transfer his powers to another wizard on his death, if he really wishes to. It happens automatically with a magical heir, but that doesn't make it better. Why should it? You make the confirmation, and, if you wish to, arrange the ritual, and then I will be your magical heir in truth, whenever you die. I hope that won't be for some decades, by the way," he added. "I want you alive to see what I achieve, and to see me surpass you."

He had to hold back his laughter as he watched Lucius's face change again. He would wager his love for Harry that his father was trying to reconcile what he knew of Draco with the words coming out of Draco's mouth, which sounded like calculated, guided insults, and failing.

What he doesn't know is that this is me, Draco exulted. Fashioning insults on the fly is something I'm good at, like spells. Just because he has to plan out what he says in advance doesn't mean I do.

"Such rituals are ugly and barbaric," Lucius began, "and no one in the Malfoy family has used them for thirteen generations."

Draco shrugged. "Because we were lucky enough to have an unbroken line of magical heirs, and all our powers could transfer automatically," he said. "Besides, what happened in that fourteenth generation back? Someone used one, didn't he? And it was for the family's sake, so that we could adapt and survive. Why are you so reluctant to confirm me as your magical heir now, Lucius? Adapt and survive. You want a magical heir. I want to be one. We both win."

"I will not use it," Lucius spat. "I will not use one of those rituals."

Draco shrugged again.

"And stop that," said Lucius. "That is a peasant gesture."

"I've seen you shrug, you know, Lucius," Draco sniped back. "You're not convincing." His mind was filled with memories his father certainly wouldn't want him thinking—not only of the shrugging, but of the fact that he had outdanced his father when he was twelve years old, when he found out that Lucius had been the one who gave Riddle's possessed diary to Harry. Memory sparked inspiration, and he crafted another insult. "Nor are you currently convincing in your role as guardian of the family honor," he added. "Of course, you lost your grip on that three years ago, didn't you?"

Once again, the shot went home, and Lucius's lips clamped shut so tightly that Draco almost thought he would draw blood from that alone. He kept his exultation off his face, mostly, limiting himself to a mocking lift of his eyebrows. Really, why was this so easy?

Because my father underestimated me. Badly. He judged me by himself. Draco thought of some of the comments Lucius had made in his letters to Draco, that he thought badly of the way Draco acted around Harry because it was not the way Lucius acted around Narcissa. He only loves two people, my mother and me, and he's blind to other forms of love.

He's blind even to the fact that I might love differently than he does. And at the same time, thinking differently about that would mean doubting his own judgment, which he almost never does. He's bound himself in chains of certainty. Not so flexible and adaptable, after all.

"I need only refuse to make you magical heir," said Lucius, very softly, "and there is nothing that you can do about it."

"Oh, yes, there is," said Draco.

"What, then?"

Draco cocked his head. "Well, I will give you a partial list, since I don't want to reveal all my tactics to an enemy," he said. "But here it is. I can reveal our family troubles to the Daily Prophet, and tell them the real reasons that you won't make me magical heir. I can refuse to become your blood heir unless you make me magical heir, and give you no one to leave anything to." He smiled at Lucius, as if he were seriously considering the next tactic he named. "I can possess you and force you to confirm me, and then your pride would prevent you from taking the confirmation back."

Lucius's whole face was pale now. "Someone would know," he said.

Draco raised his eyebrows. "Do you really understand what I mean when I talk about having possession, Lucius? It's not like the Imperius Curse. I move with your body, gesture with your hands, and speak with your voice, while you're trapped in a corner of your mind, helpless to intervene. And I possessed Dumbledore, and held him." Lucius did not need to know how short the time had been. "I think it would be much harder to detect than the Imperius Curse, really, and I'm damn sure that there are no laws saying that it's illegal to possess your father and force him to confirm you as magical heir. The possession gift is too rare."

"This is about your boyfriend." Lucius's voice was low, and ugly, and Draco understood that he had broken through his father's stubbornness at last, and was seeing the honesty he had assumed he would see from the beginning. Thank Merlin. It's about time he danced to the music. "You're only doing this because you think he won't want someone who isn't the magical heir to his family."

That did startle Draco into laughter. "Are you mad, Lucius? Of course not. Harry wouldn't look twice at someone just because he was a magical heir." He looks for other things, like compassion, and that's where I might not be able to hold him. "I will admit, I want to court him properly, and I need to be a magical heir to our family to be able to use the ritual I have in mind. And I'm sure he'll ask me all sorts of questions about the ritual when I tell him I want to court him, so I'd like to be able to reassure him that I have everything in order." He cocked his head, secure, confident, feeling as if they were both in freefall down a mountain and he was the only one who had wings. Lucius was better at studied and practiced situations, and he was better at situations in motion. "I love Harry, Lucius. That's not going to change. You should get used to it."

"You are unworthy of courting a Lord-level wizard, with the weaknesses you have," Lucius said, face twisted. Draco supposed he was being forced to change his mind about his son now, but he was obviously still resisting. "A true Malfoy would have his own interests and ambitions at heart. You think to adapt yourself to Potter—"

"His name's not Potter any more," said Draco helpfully. Inwardly, he cheered. Lucius was rattled if he'd forgotten that.

"To Harry," said Lucius, with a glare that said he resented even Harry's dropping his surname at that moment, "and not to stand for yourself. Do not lie, Draco. I have seen the way your eyes follow him. You think of nothing else but him."

Draco cocked his head and hummed. And he had the answer to this, too, rising smoothly to his lips as he could not have imagined it doing before this confrontation. "That's because I'm thinking of the future, Lucius, and not just the present. Yes, right now I don't know everything about want I want, and a lot of what I want is Harry, and I'm probably not standing enough on my own." But it's still enough to face you and best you like this, isn't it, Father, without Harry's help? "But I know that I can change, and, unlike you, I don't think I need to have the change accomplished right this moment. You want me to be some perfect little statue who never changes again. And that runs counter to the Malfoy adaptability you were just telling me about, the same quality that let you survive Voldemort." He noted in delight that Lucius had flinched at the name. "I'm going to change, instead, to become who I am and who I want in my own time. Even worse than changing myself just because of Harry would be trying to change myself into someone 'independent' of him just because someone else told me I should. I don't let others' desires guide me that way, Lucius. I want what I want, and if I want to take some time to discover how I should change, then I'll take that time."

"This is ridiculous," Lucius snapped. "This is mad. You are weak. You need Harry too much. You spend too much of your life spinning around him."

"I know that you think I should love him more the way that you love Mu—Narcissa," said Draco, deciding at the last moment that calling her "Mum" would weaken his posture of strength. "But I don't, and you'll just have to live with that, too. Part of who I am is bound up with him. That's all right. I accept that. I even want it that way." The expression of horror on his father's face really was going to make him laugh if Lucius didn't stop that. "I do need him, and trying to change that would be stupid. So I didn't choose him out of pure disinterested strength to strength, the way you chose Narcissa and she chose you, but that doesn't matter. Harry worried about the same thing, once, when he believed that he'd compelled me into liking him with the strength of his magic. I told him that it was impossible to sort out true friendship from magic, and that I didn't care. And now it's impossible for me to sort out how much is choosing and how much is needing. I don't care. I'll look into what should change and when it should change, and change it as needed. But no one else is going to hurry me into that, no one else is going to rush me. Not you, and not Harry, and not Snape, and not Narcissa. No one else in the world. I'm not a perfect, frozen statue. I'm not the perfectly independent, disinterested spectator that someone choosing Harry based on his power would be. I'm not some mad dueler who ignores his weakness and tries to increase his strengths until he's defeated, inevitably." Draco took a deep breath, feeling that the next words were incredibly important, for some reason. "I'm not you, Lucius."

And he saw them do their work.

Lucius could see that now, actually. He wondered how he had missed it for so long.

He prided himself on being able to survive because he did not make stupid mistakes, because, once he was faced with reality, he accepted it and rode it. He had done that when his father died, when the Dark Lord fell, when he realized that he had no choice but to ally with Harry, when he had seen how the Ministry changed in the wake of Fudge's departure. He might try to keep his options open, as he had once done in his alliance with Harry, but when his choices were cut off, then he could take the only one left.

And the only reasonable conclusion left now was that he had been wrong about Draco, wrong about the kind of strength he had. To go on denying that just to salve his own pride would be to act more stupidly.

He'd underestimated his son. It had taken Draco only a few insults to make him crack. His own blows had made little impact. It should not have happened, would not have happened if Lucius had been a little more clear-eyed, but it had happened, and Draco was revealed as not the ice cliff Lucius had despised him for not being, but as a fierce, fast, lithe survivor. He had that quickness that enabled wizards to win on the battlefield, when he wanted to have it.

Lucius had seen him shaken in the past, had seen his son unable to counter insults and lose his temper, and he was of the opinion that Draco needed to summon his determination more often. But that did not excuse his own profound mistake in denying the nature of the opponent he faced.

He held out his hand to his son, who was not him, and not Abraxas, and was not any of the Malfoys Lucius had studied for the last thirteen generations, but surely might be the heir to Septimus Malfoy, who had argued his mother into transferring her powers to him on her death, even though Septimus was not her magical heir. "You have faced me," he said. "I shall do as you have asked."

Draco smiled at him. "Thank you," he said. "I'm glad." And those were, if not the concluding words of the ritual, at least appropriately simple. "You'll confirm me as magical heir?" he asked, testing.

Lucius nodded.

"And you'll use the ritual to transfer your magic to me when you die?"

Lucius gave him a swift, reprimanding look, and Draco nodded, understanding that he had pushed too far. He hadn't asked for that, only suggested it, and with the facing ended, they were father and son once more. He had no right to ask for something Lucius did not yet want to give.

"Then should we approach the confirmation now?" Draco turned towards the door, but looked expectantly at his father over his shoulder.

Lucius studied him for a long moment.

There had never been much room in his life for delight. The closest he could remember feeling to it was when Narcissa agreed to marry him, and when Draco was born. Lucius took a long moment to recognize the emotion that was rising in him with as much determination as a green plant forcing its way through a stone.

He had raised a son who was a worthy heir. He had spent years reconciling himself to the fact that he'd spoiled Draco, indulged him so much that he had little chance of getting a decent Malfoy out of him, and to the fact that he was not Lucius's magical heir. And now Draco had proved him wrong, and given him a worthy heir in the process.

He had made one mistake, but it had kept him from making another, and more profound, one—seeing only just enough of Draco to try to mold him in an absolutely contrary direction to the one he wanted to go. Instead, he'd left him almost alone, and Draco had grown strong and flourished without his interference.

"We shall," he said, and strode past Draco to take the lead, letting the delight grow in him for the moment. It was not as though the other emotions would not come back later.

I have a son. And he is worthy.