Chapter 3 - The reactions to the kidnapping.
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Lucius Malfoy's reaction
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Lucius Malfoy had been grateful when his wife had been able to produce an heir, as they had been told she may be able to bear children. He named his son, Draco Lucius, and the older man could not wait until he could begin teaching his child about the Dark Arts.
A month after his son had been born, Lucius realized that Draco seemed to be taking forever to grow. It occured to him that he could use an aging potion to help him along, but decided against it, as it could backfire. Besides, the only Potions Master he would trust to make it, seemed to have dropped off of the face of the earth. Or, so he thought.
When he had become a Death Eater, he had promised his lord his first, and only, son, unless he had a child with another woman. That was unthinkable, because there was no guarantee that the child would be a boy, and it would be bastard to boot. Also, he did not want to think about the Dark Lord's reaction, if he found out.
One evening, soon after he had worried about Draco he decided to get himself a fire whiskey, without summoning a house elf. Later on, he would find himself wondering if things would have been better if he had not been the one who found the empty room.
As he passed his son's room, he saw that his son was missing from his crib, but thought that his wife, Narcissa, had simply taken him to their bedroom. He drank a few glasses of his fire whiskey, before he joined his wife. He felt his heart racing when he saw that she was asleep, and hisn son was nowhere in sight.
"Dobby!" Lucius called sternly.
A small green, house elf appeared with a pop.
"Yes, Ma..Master?" he stuttered.
"Where is Draco?!" the blond haired man demanded.
"I's so...sorry, Master, but I's is not sensing him in the manor," Dobby replied from his place on the floor, cringing in fear.
"Go before I kill you," Lucius snarled, so upset that he forgot to use the cruciatus curse on the frightened creature.
He quickly put a sleeping spell on Narcissa and hurried downstairs to the entrance foyer. From this point he could access the every inch of the mansion using a specially designed tracking charm. His anger mounted when all he could detect were his wife, himself and the house elves.
Frustrated, he pulled out a medallion that he kept on himself at all times. It was linked to an ankle bracelet was supposed to never come off of his son. It was blank. He suddenly found himself regretting not adding a charm that would tell him if his son was alive, or not.
"Fuck!" Lucius hissed. He could not understand why the charm had not worked, as he been taught it by the Dark Lord himself.
Coming to regret all the drinks he had consumed as they made clear thinking extremely difficult, he headed to his study to decide his next course of action.
Just over an hour later, and a sobriety potion, he apparated out of the mansion, and went to an orphanage. It was home to all the children who had lost their families to Voldemort. He paused for a minute to check the wards and was pleased to find that they were minimal.
He walked into the nursery and cast a sleeping spell over the infant occupants, before he looked for and found the palest child. Thankful that it was a boy, because gender transfiguration was beyond his ability. He then proceeded to put the spells on the little boy that would make him look like a perfect likeness to Draco. He put the spare ankle bracelet, on the baby, very glad that he had gotten extras in case something happened to the original.
The charms would have to be renewed on his "son's" sixteenth birthday, as they could not last any longer then that. If, at some point, the real Draco came home alive, he could always kill the child he had stolen.
His return home went undetected, and he put the boy into the crib in the nursery. Now, he knew that he would ahve to hope the Dark Lord never discovered his deception, or Lucius would be dead.
"I hope he never finds out," Lucius sighed to the sky. But, he was not certain if he was referring to Voldemort or his real son.
Unknown to Lucius, his fellow Death Eaters who had also lost their children had done the same thing. They replaced their lost children with stolen ones. They knew that sooner or later they would be found out, but they hoped it was not until much later.
The entire scheme came unravelled when the children turned eleven years old, and their magic overcame the disguise spells.
Narcissa had gone mental when she found outthat her son was not Draco Malfoy, but a half-blood with a muggle father, by the name of Andrew Landerson.
She immediately contacted the Ministry for Magic demanding, along with the other duped mothers, that their real children be found. In the meantime, the children were under the threat of death if they revealed what was happening, and caused any embarrassment to the purebloods.
To Lucius', and the other disgraced Death Eaters distaste, the few free Death Eaters who had not been captured or had no children, had taken the failed plotters to the Malfoy dungeons. There they had used tortures that Voldemort had used before his downfall.
They were not punished for their schemes, but for their failure in getting caught. The punishment for the deception would come from the Dark Lord, himself.
The disgraced Death Eaters were also warned to find their children by the time they would have graduated from Hogwarts.
If they didn't, all the participants and their families, as well as the fake children would suffer an extremely painful death.
They only had six years to find their real offspring, so they cooperated and met frequently trying to track them.
Three years later, after Wormtail had restored the Dark Lord to a new body and since the rat had kept Voldemort apprised of what was going on in the wizarding world, their lord agreed with how everything was handled. His punishments brought the disgraced Death Eaters to the brink of death, and then were told that only basic healing spells could be used.
During fifth year, when the Ministry was trying very hard to destroy Harry Potter's reputation, Lucius and the others were desperate enough to bribe Fudge to use the Aurors and Unspeakables to search for the heirs. They made the Ministry people take unbreakable vows to not reveal what they were doing during their seaches. Lucius was confident that their troubles would soon be over.
As such, the families were shocked and astounded when the Ministry searches revealed no trace of the missing children.
At the end of fifth year, after the battle at the Ministry, when Lucius and the others were locked away in Azkaban, Fudge called off the searches. Unbeknownst to the Death Eaters, the vows they had forced on the Ministry searchers were broken, as the searches had been conducted in good faith.