The Lucius & Draco Scene (Justitia/Ultio)
Draco paced the length of his bedroom, anxiously waiting for his father to come in. He knew he'd fucked up—very, very badly—but he didn't think he could've helped it. Taking away Delphi's wand had been utterly ridiculous, and Draco couldn't believe his father had actually had the nerve. And, yeah, maybe he shouldn't have said what he said, but it had been all he could think of at the time—and, more importantly, he'd been right. If his father knew the truth about Delphi (and he couldn't see how it could be possible that he didn't), then surely he should've understood why he couldn't take her wand away. Draco couldn't say that he knew a ton about the Dark Lord, no, but there was no question in his mind that the guy would never have been on board with letting someone take his daughter's magic away. It didn't matter that it was just for a few weeks as a punishment; it was going too far, way too far, and all it was going to do anyway was make Delphi hate them even more than she already did.
Draco wondered if she appreciated that he'd tried to stand up for her. He certainly hoped so—because he was definitely going to pay for it.
When the bedroom door opened at last, Draco startled. He stopped his anxious pacing, but he couldn't quite muster up the courage to meet his father's eye.
"What were you thinking?" his father demanded, and Draco couldn't help but cringe.
"Her wand—"
"I don't give a damn about her wand right now, Draco. How much do you know? What did she tell you?"
That anger in his father's voice could not possibly have made itself more clear. Draco practically stumbled over himself as he plunged into his explanation. "Her friends all stopped talking to her for a while last year," he said. "I thought, you know, maybe they'd had a fight or something. So I asked. I figured maybe I'd get the chance to talk some sense into her... But then she told me what they were actually upset about, and, well..."
"Her friends know?" Father said, looking as horrified as Draco himself had felt last year when he'd found out the same. "How many people has she told?"
Draco wracked his brain, trying to remember who she'd mentioned. "Dumbledore, definitely. And Lilly Moon—a Slytherin in our year. Probably Potter, Weasley, Granger, and Longbottom, too. I told her not to tell them, but I'm sure she has by now. Hopefully nobody else knows, but..." He shrugged, hoping that the gesture got his point across well enough: that for all Delphi could be brilliant sometimes, every now and then she acted like she didn't have any brains at all.
"How did she find out?" Father asked through gritted teeth. "The diary?"
"What diary?"
His father stared at him for a moment. "Never mind." He closed his eyes and rubbed his palm against his face for a moment. Draco considered pressing him about this diary thing but decided against it. Maybe tomorrow or something, sometime when he seemed like he was in a better mood... "You understand, I hope, that you cannot repeat this? You cannot tell your friends. You understand how much danger you'd be putting her in if you did?"
"I'm not stupid," Draco said, scowling, but his father only raised a brow.
"You nearly just blurted it out to me because you didn't want me to take her wand away," said Father. "That was stupid, Draco. You must be more careful than that."
"But I was right! You can't take the Dark Lord's daughter's wand."
"I can," Father said coldly, "and I did. And believe me when I tell you, Draco, that he would very likely do far worse than simply that, if he were here."
"What do you mean?"
His father shot him a look that said he was being stupid once again. "What do you think is going to happen to her if the Dark Lord comes back? You know even better than I do what she's been like the past two years. Her mother has already threatened to kill her for it, did she tell you that? Delphi is putting herself in unbelievable danger. Within only months of going to that school, she threw her lot in with Harry Potter, and how do you think that's going to work out for us if her father ever returns? Your mother and I raised her. It's not going to matter that we didn't plan for her to turn out like this; we'll still be blamed. We will be punished, and so will she."
"I've tried to tell her that!" Draco protested. "I've tried to convince her that she needs to stop hanging out with Potter and Granger and that lot and start thinking about how to get back in her dad's good graces, but she won't listen."
"Of course she won't listen," said Father. "She's a teenager. She's not going to listen to common sense; at her age, she might as well be allergic to it. I'm sure she thinks it's very exciting to turn her back on the way she was raised. Children like Delphi always do. And it's also hardly a coincidence that she's chosen to attach herself to Potter; girls like Delphi always go after whichever boy will make their fathers the most furious. Add in Potter's celebrity, and I'm sure her hormone-addled brain thinks she's made a wonderful choice."
"She says they're just friends," said Draco. Never mind that he didn't actually believe it—and that the thought of her and Harry together made him too queasy for words.
His father scoffed. "Oh, I'm sure she does. I've no doubt she'll do what they all do. She'll hide it until she realizes she's in over her head, and then she'll come crying to your mother asking for help when she's—" When she's what? Draco thought, horrified. "Well, we want to cut it off before it gets to that point."
"How?"
Something about his father's faint smirk struck Draco as vaguely worrisome. "Do you remember learning about the Gaunts?"
His brow furrowed. Vaguely, he did remember them, but he didn't see how they could possibly be relevant right now. "Yes?"
"Do you recall why they died out?"
Draco felt his cheeks go very slightly pink. "There was too much inbreeding," he answered stiffly. "Cousins, at first. Then outright incest. The whole family was mad by the end of it, weren’t they?"
Draco's father nodded. "They were. And the halfbloods and blood traitors would like to pretend we're all like that; they love to spread their little lies about how we all marry our cousins in our obsession to keep our bloodlines pure." Draco wondered what that meant for him nad Delphi; he'd thought his father still kind of wanted him to marry her someday, but could he actually have misunderstood? "It's not true, of course. We do aim for purity, yes, but we're far from reckless about it. That's the point of keeping such clear records of our family trees; those of us who still care about blood purity can very easily find out who will and will not make for a good match. Your mother and I had our lineages analyzed in our sixth year; because our direct ancestors hadn't intermarried for several generations, your grandfathers both agreed that I was allowed to propose."
Draco had no idea what he was supposed to say to that.
His father pressed on. "And because we have been so careful for generations, Draco, it means that we have a luxury the Gaunts did not. They married cousins to cousins for generations and made themselves more defective and degenerate with every subsequent birth. But it doesn't have to work that way. Defects only emerge after there's a pattern of inbreeding, not an instance; a single marriage between two cousins is not going to corrupt an entire family tree."
He does still want me to marry her, then, Draco realized. And to be honest… he wasn't sure how he felt about. He'd never really interrogated it before. It had just become a fact to him: there was a possibility that he might marry Delphi someday, and he didn't think that would be too terrible, and eventually he’d just have to decide whether or not that was what he wanted to do. It had mostly just been pushed into the back of his brain as a future problem, not something to worry about right now. So he hadn't even considered the inbreeding angle; he hadn't worried at all about how their kids might turn out because he hadn't ever really truly contemplated what being married and having children would actually be like.
(Making them, sure, he'd occasionally entertained the thought of. Of course he had. He was a boy, after all, and what else was he supposed to think about besides pretty girls?)
Draco’s cheeks felt very hot, and he knew he must have gone terribly red. "Er, Delphi and I are, uh..." But the thought trailed off because he wasn't sure how to finish it. He and Delphi were what? Besides cousins, what were they actually? They weren't betrothed or whatever the hell, and he was pretty sure she wouldn't want to be… Except that, really, he'd kind of been trying not to think about that, actually, hadn't he? Because really, maybe that was the crux of it: maybe he hadn't really bothered to think about whether or not he would actually ever want to marry Delphi because he was already pretty sure it was a lost cause—and he hated ever having to admit that there was something he actually wanted but wouldn't ever get to have. The more time she spent hanging around Potter, after all, the less likely it seemed that she would ever be interested in anyone else... and that surely that couldn't be fair because she was his cousin and they were purebloods and those two facts together were supposed to mean that he had dibs.
Never mind that Delphi would probably murder him if he ever dared to say as much.
But his father did not stop for Draco’s rambling inner monologue. "Delphi," he said, "is the Dark Lord's daughter. You should marry her. She is the single best prospect you could ever hope to have. If the Dark Lord never returns, so be it; marrying her would still bring the Black fortune into the family, with luck. And if he does return? Marrying her would make you his son-in-law. Your children would be his grandchildren. You would have power and influence that the rest of his followers would kill to have even a fraction of."
"No," Draco said, shaking his head before he could think to stop himself. He honestly felt a little bit panicky, and he wasn’t sure which part had scared him more: ‘his son-in-law,’ ‘your children,’ or ‘his grandchildren.’ "Delphi's already made it pretty clear she doesn’t want anything to do with him. And—and I'm pretty sure she's not interested in me."
"Delphi is thirteen; there is plenty of time for her to come to her senses. And if she’s not interested in you now? We can change her mind on that front, too," his father said. "Or are you not interested in her?"
Draco wanted to say he wasn’t. And he tried. He tried to make himself say that he wasn't genuinely interested in Delphi in the slightest, that he didn't even think she was very pretty, that he only hated the thought of her with Potter because it was disgusting (certainly not out of any jealousy), and that he definitely had never imagined kissing her just so he could see the look on Potter’s stupid face.
What he actually managed to say instead was:
"Change her mind how?"
His father smiled at him, indulgent and proud. “She’ll be here every summer at least until she turns seventeen and hopefully for a while afterward. And when she’s here, she’s not with them—so make the most of it. Don’t antagonize her. She might not want you around at first, but once she gets lonely enough, she’ll warm up to it. Don’t put any pressure on her, and try to do something nice for her every now and then.”
“Like what?”
“In the morning, I’m going to give you her bag. Take it back to her and tell her that you convinced me to let her have it. She’ll appreciate that.”
“But you’re keeping her wand?”
“Argue with me about it again and I’ll take yours, too.” Draco’s mouth snapped shut. “In the long run, if you’re lucky, you can hopefully make her see sense. For now, though, just try to endear yourself to her. Remind her that the two of you actually used to get along. And don’t get any bright ideas about trying to touch her, do you understand me?”
Draco’s eyed widened. “I wouldn’t—”
“No, a boy your age would never.” Father rolled his eyes. “Make the most of this summer, Draco. Don’t let it go to waste. She’ll be seventeen faster than you realize, and by then it might already be too late.”
Draco watched his father go in silence, feeling strangely thrown off balance by the whole thing. He was terribly embarrassed but also weirdly excited… and maybe even a little bit afraid?
Marrying her would make you his son-in-law. Your children would be his grandchildren.
Did he actually want that? He knew he clearly was supposed to… but it honestly sounded terrifying.
Then again—
No, a boy your age would never.
No matter what else Draco tried to think about nor how hard her tried to steer his brain away, Draco found he couldn't seem to help but wonder: what ‘bright ideas’ might Harry and Delphi have already had?