The Heir of Slytherin
The Usual Disclaimer: No claim of ownership, no money expected, etc.
Warnings: Serious AU. If you, like one of my reviewers, hates Draco Malfoy wit ha vengeance, you might as well stop reading right now. Redemption ensues. Bad pun warning as well.
December 7, 2041
It was the night of the full moon in the month before the winter solstice, and the Minster of Magic sat on the fallen log, where he usually sat for the Acceptance of the Foals ceremony. He remembered 50 years before when he was first allowed, actually forced, to witness the event. So much had changed since then. For the last twenty years, he was actually invited to attend.
He thought back to the day in September of that year, when in retrospect, he had actually started to grow up. The day when Harry Potter had proved to be more of a Snake than any member of Slytherin House. Potter had waited patiently, and at his moment, had struck decisively.
Before that day, Draco had accepted his upbringing. He 'knew' that, given his status as the prince of a pure-blood family, he was privileged. He was invulnerable. That day proved he was very vulnerable.
And Potter had gotten away with it, just as Draco had been taught that he could get away with anything himself. The half-blood spawn of blood-traitors had gotten away with it, and then exhibited power beyond anything Draco had ever seen.
That told him that what he had been taught was a lie.
Draco Malfoy was not stupid. When he was only a firsty at Hogwarts, he had not been stupid. Arrogant, yes. Bigoted, yes. Taught to be super-entitled, definitely. But stupid, no.
Later that autumn, his detention in the forest had shown him that there was beauty that he had never imagined. Then, being confronted by the centaur warriors with their capes of the flesh of Death Eaters put the lie to the teaching that the Death Eaters were invincible. The fact that these creatures, that he had been taught to despise and completely discount, had not only killed Death Eaters but had killed hundreds and made capes from their trophies, showed that the were vincible. Very vincible.
When the Death Eaters tortured his mother and then the massacre of Malfoy Manor killed his father, his new world-view was confirmed. The Death Eaters were not the epitome of wizarding kind; they were just murderous thugs who were fighting over their blood-stained booty.
His mother had been healed of her physical scars, but the mental and emotional scars remained, to a degree even all these years later. He helps where he could, but the haughty pure-blood Belle-of-the-Ball whose distain for the less beings had marked her life, was now gone forever. What had been the basis of her life was gone and shown to be the sham it was.
Draco had a lot of time to think over the next few years. For the first year after his father's death and his mother's torture at the hands and wands of those he had grown up thinking were family friends who held the same beliefs and values, he had spent many nights either holding his mother as she cried herself to sleep, or comforting her when she woke screaming from nightmares. If he did not change his ways, it was his skin which might end up as part of a centaur warrior's cape.
In their time together Draco and his mother spoke extensively, saying things to each other that in their old lives would have gotten them killed, and probably that only after extensive and prolonged unpleasantness.
He would have called for help from family friends, except that most of the so-called friends had been killed in the massacre that took his father and contributed to his mother's nightmares, or else they were sympathizers to the Death Eaters' cause. Draco knew that they would be of very little help. In fact, if his distrust of them became known, or he stood against them, they would challenge him to a duel, and given that most of them had cast unforgivables (which were forgiven by the Ministry, after sufficient payment), he would not last five minutes. A first year student against an experienced and seasoned Death Eater was not what could be called an fair contest, by any stretch of the imagination.
Draco also knew that the so-called 'Light' side would not trust him with a burned out candle, given his name and family history. At least at first, and some, never.
He would have to tread very carefully. He knew he could no longer trust anyone who had long been allies of his family.
It had turned out that getting shed of three of his closest contacts on the Dark side was much easier than he had expected. After the encounter with Harry Potter, and with the death of their parents in the Malfoy Massacre cutting off their generous allowances, Crabbe and Goyle decided that hanging around with, and protecting, Draco was just not worth their time and effort. It might be hazardous to their health as well, as Vincent had found out in a particularly effective demonstration.
Separating his family connection from the Parkinsons was a bit more elaborate. Cecil Parkinson, Pansy's father, had always thought of himself as the number two of the Death Eaters, and a brilliant strategist. This view was not shared universally, and Draco had heard his father refer to the senior Parkinson as 'Cecil Parks-it-outside' many times.
The Parkinson patriarch had arrived at the Malfoy residence, having missed the 'Bloody Gathering', intent on finalizing a marriage contract between his daughter and Draco, as Draco and Pansy had been childhood friends, and so knew each other fairly well. He also pointed out to Narcissa that a mere woman could not possibly run the vast Malfoy estate and wealth, so he proposed to take over the management, and as a side benefit, Narcissa could become his mistress.
After agreeing to a tentative arrangement (with no guarantees of future contact or any contract) for the Malfoys to fund Pansy's schooling in Australian or the United States (she could certainly not return to Hogwarts having been expelled, but they spoke English there, so no need for any of the Frog or Kraut language requirements for his daughter [his comments when Beauxbatons and Durmstrang were mentioned], and where Cecil was quite unaware that the whole pure-blood aristocracy was seen for the crap it truly was (England being the centre and leader of the world in his opinion). Draco and Narcissa agreed to the scholarship, as Pansy had been Draco's best friend growing up (they had even played Healer together as youngsters), and they both thought that leaving her at home with Cecil was the worst thing they could do for the girl who, although a bit stupid, was the product of her upbringing like themselves.
With Pansy effectively pulled out from under her father's thumb, the two Malfoys felt there might be hope for her yet.
After this, and following a few of the private Black family memory charms from Narcissa's wand, Cecil forgot why he had come to the house, and how he had come by the rather painful lower abdominal injuries. After leaving the Manor house, he promptly forgot how to return.
After long thought, Draco came to the conclusion that the only ones he actually could trust were Harry Potter, the goblins and the centaurs. He concluded that there were three stages of affection, not two as most people thought. With love and hate, you still had an emotional investment in the other, whereas there was also complete indifference, which was colder even than hate. And Potter and those two groups couldn't care less about his well-being, or indeed his continued existence. To them, he was holding down the grass under his feet, and nothing more. In that, they were most unusual - most either admired him, loved him, or hated him.
Perhaps the goblins might care, but only so far as he was the heir to a fortune – they loved the galleons, but not who held them. Heirs come and go, but the gold lasts.
Between bouts of comforting his mother, Draco had the opportunity to look through the family library. The Malfoys were an old family, as well as an acquisitive one, and the library had a number of very old and very rare books.
One book Draco found was in an old language which seemed a bit like a mixture of old Germanic or Norse, and Latin. The leather cover was embossed with a golden gryphon, and inside the book was a signature which seemed written in gold, and was of Goderique de Le Gryfon d'Or. The title was something like Fundatio Hogwartiana. One of the other books was of obscure spells, including one universal translator which would instantly translate whatever language a book was in to the reader's own language. Draco found he was holding a handwritten copy of The Foundation of Hogwarts School, by Goderic Gryffindor himself, and dedicated to "My good friend and colleague, Salazar Slytherin".
Draco was stunned by this inscription. The 'common knowledge' in Slytherin House was that Gryffindor and Slytherin had become mortal enemies, and this had been the basis for the long-standing enmity between the two houses.
Being fascinated by this apparent contradiction to the basis of his view of the world, Draco read the book from cover to cover several times. Gryffindor, who had been a general in the wars against the Vikings (or Danes as they were known) had valued Slytherin's war planning, as the wizard had been 'the most cunning person of my acquaintance'.
Draco knew that the house he had been sorted into was supposed to be known for ambition and cunning, but from his observations, their ambitions had been mostly to seize power or material goods, and their 'cunning' could be more accurately called 'underhanded sneakiness'. The height of his housemates' 'cunning' had been setting up sneak attacks on the Quidditch players of other houses.
It appeared that the concept and level of both the ambition and the cunning has deteriorated badly over the years. Given his personal situation and that of what remained of his family at the time, Draco had known that his ambition was to remain alive and uninjured, and this alone would require a great deal of cunning to achieve.
He had had to convince his family's circle of old friends that what might appear to be distancing himself from the cause of the Dark Lord, was in fact a sneaky way to restore the credibility of the family with the ministry, while retaining control of the bank accounts which might be otherwise confiscated. He also, and at the same time, had to convince the 'Light' and 'Neutral' factions that he posed no threat to them.
He soon came to the conclusion that most of the more devoted virulent and vicious classmates and housemates in Slytherin House had the collective intelligence of a bowl of oatmeal, and that there were several who, like himself, were cleverly keeping their heads down. This latter group, he cultivated cautiously.
Groups outside his historical circle, he also cultivated carefully. His approach was to show that, working together, they could achieve what neither could manage on their own. His win-win doctrine was something not seen in the British wizarding world for quite some time.
For most of the pure-blood traditionalists, the idea was that 'I don't win unless you lose'. Draco knew that there was always some loss in any transaction, whether it could be called friction, bribery, corruption, entropy or whatever, so any win-lose would eventually bring both sides down, while a win-win could build something that never occurred before.
Over the years, Draco had kept up a correspondence with Pansy, who was studying at the Red Wands School of Magic near some swamps outside of Baton Rouge Louisiana. (The school had been started by Uno Howe, an American before the time of the civil war, who did not accept that magic should be restricted to whites only – the swamp was now called Howe's Bayou. There she had blossomed as a talented witch, who fell in love with and eventually married a young Haitian man who was training to become a voodoo priest who was also studying there. When her father found out that she was dating what he called a 'wog', he disowned her – Pansy threw a party to celebrate this turn of events.
When Madame Pansy L'Ouverture, her husband and three chocolate-skinned children attended her father's funeral some years later, she commented that the loud humming everyone heard was probably her father spinning in his casket.
Pansy had also learned that outside the British wizarding aristocracy, she was not expected to live her life solely as a brood mare for a rich pure-blood wizard, as had been the fate of her mother Jasmine. She came to realize in retrospect that getting expelled from Hogwarts was probably the best thing she ever accomplished.
The Malfoy Educational Foundation also provided funds for other pure-blood children who had been rendered paupers by the 'party at the Malfoys', as it became known. The funds were not restricted to attendance at Hogwarts, which struck many of the 'old crowd' as odd, but Draco insisted that the Fund was set up so as not to interfere with the educational choices of the families or the students.
The fund also gave scholarships to some first-generation and half-blood wizards and witches, as long as they took their educations outside Britain – this was explained as getting some uppity and unworthy kids out of the society where they didn't belong. The fact was that, when these people returned, they tended to start surprisingly well-funded businesses which quickly outcompeted those who stuck completely to only the traditional (and obsolete) products. Those business that survived started to import products from 'the colonies', which they had neglected since the American revolution. The wizarding society soon found that the new gadgets and conveniences seem to be come essential to their comfortable lifestyles. The built-in compulsion charms had, of course, absolutely nothing to do with this shift in attitude.
Some of the new products had some real benefits. Wandmaster Ollivander found that the cedar and sasquatch hair wands were excellent for invisibility charms, while the Manitoba Maple and jackalope antler wands had properties that facilitated seeing a long way and travelling at high speeds over long distances.
One other feature for the Malfoy Fund was the establishments of primary schools for the pure-blood community (some fifteen years after Draco's own graduation from Hogwarts). This was announced as a plan to allow pure-blood witches to spend their time more productively, hosting parties and such, rather than spending their days tutoring children before they went on to an equally pointless education at Hogwarts where Professor Binns was still teaching events from over two centuries ago, being still blissfully unaware of anything that had occurred since his own death.
Narcissa and Draco had discussed many things over the intervening years, and comparing their own upbringings, had come to the conclusion that one problem with how backward the wizarding society remained had been a direct consequence of each generation home-schooling the next combined with their long lifespans, so that most pure-blood wizarding children were brought up in the beliefs and outlooks that had gone out of fashion when the Stuarts were still on the throne.
All of these changes were, of course, introduced as being purely for the benefit of the pure-bloods. All public announcements in the wizarding press were couched in the appropriate terms, demeaning the 'unworthy' and praising the new opportunities for the 'quality'. More covert information was provided to 'the others'.
Narcissa had taught Draco to heed the principle of the 'frog in hot water'. When unwelcome changes occurred slowly enough, those who were sure to object did not notice the changes occurring, until it was too late to do anything about it, without upsetting everything. By the time people noticed that things had changed, they were already accustomed to the new ways.
These subtle changes to the wizarding community were not unnoticed by some with the ability to see beyond their own day-to-day obsessions.
Gradually, the House of Malfoy regained its respect. Draco Malfoy became the first Minster of Magic from his house, at the age of forty-four.
Three years earlier, Draco had received a letter, which he came to cherish as an indication of what he wanted his life to be. It invited him to attend that year's 'Approval of the Foals' ceremony, and was signed by the Liaison to the Humans, Harry Potter.