Slytherin's Legacy Behind-the-Scenes

"What the hell am I supposed to do?" Lucius demands.

Narcissa has only so much sympathy—and not a single good idea. "I don't know," she says quite honestly. "My mother was never able to shake Andromeda from her insanity, and Walpurga failed with Sirius, too." She looks away from her husband; she doesn't like to even think this awful truth she knows she must admit. "It's a defect in the Black line, I imagine. Something that pops up in the blood every now and then. Most of us avoid it, but every new birth is another coin toss and Delphi's has come up tails."

"I don't accept it," Lucius insists, as if the fates would ever be concerned with what he thinks. "I simply won't allow it. We're going to fix this. We must."

He isn't wrong about that, at least. The truth has loomed over them for some time now: the rumors of the Dark Lord's doings are swirling ever stronger as the years keep marching on, and they will almost certainly see him back to power before the decade's end. And when he inevitably comes to check on the child that he left with Bellatrix—the one she so rudely foisted upon them—they will have no choice but to present him with a disappointment. A daughter ill-fitting of his lineage. Smart, yes, and perhaps even powerful... but a blood traitor above all else.

Whatever has broken inside of Delphi—whatever has caused her to turn out so wrong—Narcissa knows they have to fix it before her father comes back. Because if they don't... if they become in his eyes the couple who tried and failed to raise his daughter into a proper witch... What hope will they have of escaping his wrath alive?

"There's nothing more that we can do," says Narcissa. "The child is defective. She can be a perfectly lovely girl when she wants to, but there's just no sense to her at all these days. If half the things Draco told us for the past two years were true, she's lost to us. Lost to the Dark Lord. I can't begin to imagine how we could ever get her back."

Lucius closes his eyes for a moment, and Narcissa watches the gesture with a certain detached disdain. She loves her husband, surely, but she can practically see the gears turning in his head just a tad too slow to be as helpful as she'd like. "I have told Draco," he tells her, "to pay more attention to Delphi this month. To keep her company during her punishment. If he can endear himself to her, perhaps—"

But Narcissa only shakes her head, because if Draco hasn't already endeared himself to Delphi over the past thirteen years, then why would that suddenly change now? "He should move on to other prospects. The Parkinsons have a girl his age. The Greengrasses have two. Delphi will not be—"

"Delphi is the Dark Lord's daughter!" Lucius nearly yells, and Narcissa raises a brow that makes his shoulders sag. He goes on, looking half-defeated already: "Cissy, she is his best prospect. There is no question of that. Securing Delphi would mean that he secures his future alongside the Dark Lord for the rest of his life."

"Unless," Narcissa says, and even if perhaps she's skirting into dangerous territory, she has to say it because her husband has to hear, "her father kills her and Draco either gets his heart broken or dies too."

Lucius has the nerve to dismiss her with a scoff. "Our son isn't some imbecile. Lord knows it seems that way sometimes, but he's hardly completely daft. If nothing else, I know he's smart enough to put himself first; that boy knows how to keep his hands clean and protect himself. He'll have a better shot at pulling Delphi out of this spiral she's in than she'll have of dragging him down with her."

"That girl," Narcissa insists, "is the product of both Bella and the Dark Lord. That is a terribly dangerous combination, Lucius. There is no doubt in my mind that Delphi can be at least as ruthless and effective as either of them if she puts her mind to it. She is a threat to Draco, darling, in every conceivable way—whether that's something you're willing to admit or not. We do not need to hang her around his neck like an albatross; that girl's future is cursed no matter where it goes from here. Don't get him tangled up in it anymore than he already is. If you tie our son to that girl, you will risk dooming him even if you do manage to pull her out of the death spiral that she's in. Darling, what if something goes wrong? Yes, maybe their marriage would make him the Dark Lord's favorite, but for how long would that last? And what if the Dark Lord falls again? What if he simply doesn't forgive her for what he's already done? Worse—what if encouraging Draco to get closer to her only serves to turn him toward madness, too?"

"So what, then?" Lucius demands. The frustration in his voice is palpable, and Narcissa has the sudden urge to throw up her hands and storm from the room. Let him solve this problem on his own. Let him be the one to make the final decision; let him be the one who has to reconcile them to the decision to prune their niece from the family just like she already had to do to her own— "Do we give up? Disavow her? Write her off as a loss and start trying to find some way to wriggle out of the consequences of letting her grow up to be Harry Potter's hanger-on?"

Narcissa looks pointedly away from him. Why does he think she has any answers? She's no more ready for this than she was ready when Bella dropped Delphi off as a toddler 'for a little while' and then tortured the Longbottoms into a life sentence. Truth be told, she's still shocked that Delphi even exists in the first place (and deeply suspicious regarding the why of it all). To her, Delphi's future has always been a vague and misty thing full of worrisome possibility; that she's likely destined to die for choosing Harry Potter instead of her own blood is almost a relief compared to some of the thoughts that Narcissa's imagination have brought her over the years. Still, the threat of consequences... "I don't know, Lucius. You know I don't know."

"We can pull her back in," Lucius says, an edge of determination strengthening his voice so abruptly that Narcissa wants to call it pure delusion. "We use Draco, and we try to start fresh. I still cannot believe she tried to run away. Where on earth was she even going to go?"

"Sirius ran away when he was just a year or two older than her. James Potter's family took him in."

Lucius frowns at her; apparently he does not find this detail helpful. "Walpurga was a nightmare when she was still alive; you've told me as much yourself. Ranting and raving at the slightest provocation... Of course she drove him away in the end. You and I are better than that. We have to stop driving Delphi away."

Narcissa's brow lifts again. She's the one who tries to get Delphi to write her, who always asks Draco how Delphi's doing while they're away at school, who sends her presents on her birthday and Christmas and receives nothing in return. If anyone is driving Delphi away from them, it's certainly not her. "Which one of us took her to pick out an elf?"

Her husband does not even have the good sense to look ashamed of himself. He moves his hand like he's swatting at a fly, and deflects, "She chose well, didn't she? If not for—what's it's name?"

"Ruth," Narcissa answers, hoping that the elf in question will have the good sense not to take it as a summons.

"Yes, right. If not for the elf, we would've lost her today. She would've disappeared off into the night with Potter and who knows who else, and—"

"And we would've had her back by morning," Narcissa says, unamused. "They're thirteen. They would have gone to Diagon Alley or Hogwarts or some other silly place, and anyone with a modicum of sense would've turned them in. And I'm sure Dumbledore's watching Potter like a hawk now that Sirius is on the loose again."

"What if the Weasleys had taken them in? Or the girl's family, the muggle one? No sense to be found there."

Narcissa fights against the unladylike urge to roll her eyes at her husband. "Then we would have gone to the Ministry and had them activate her Trace. She can't get away from us, Lucius. If you intend to win her over, you have time. You simply have to stop making quite so many mistakes."

"She set Dobby free!"

They've had this fight. Narcissa isn't interested in having it again. "Dobby was a terrible elf. If Ruth proves to be as good a choice as she seems, then Delphi did us a favor by getting rid of him. We should've done it ourselves."

"Do you realize how much Smith charges for—?" Lucius cuts himself off mid-fury. "Never mind. You keep praising her for the elf and Draco will try to bond with her a bit. And I will apologize, I suppose." The way he says it makes it clear that he'd rather do anything else in the world. Narcissa searches idly through her memory, trying to recall if her father—or even her mother, for that matter—ever apologized to her. She doesn't think they did.

"This is about a boy, Lucius," Narcissa says at last, feeling exhausted already by the prospect of having to explain this to him. "Delphi is pulling away from us because of a boy. You know that as well as I do. It's one of the three, and we all know which one it most likely is. If it's the Weasley, that's a tragedy; if it's the Longbottom, that's practically perverse. Both of them, though, are at least purebloods, and her reputation afterwards might be salvageable if she ever comes to her sense. But even forgetting the rest of who and what Potter is, his mother was a mudblood. Once he touches her, that's it."

"We can't get her away from him without pulling her from school," Lucius says. "And Bella said the Dark Lord was clear about sending the girl to Hogwarts."

He's not here, though, is he, Narcissa has too much sense to say.

"So we send her back to Hogwarts," Narcissa says, trying not to sound too condescending. "After letting her stew for a full month in how angry she is at you for taking her wand. Then she goes and tells all her little friends how horrible we are, and their sympathy cements it in her mind. Next June, she's back—then what? What do you propose we do differently? How do you propose to convince her that her friends and her teachers and the great Albus Dumbledore are all wrong while we are right? She already knows who her father is; we can't leverage that truth into any reconciliation at this point. We should have told her to begin with; she would have stayed away from Potter if we had."

"Or she would have been even more drawn to him," Lucius says darkly. "She's stubborn, Cissy. Just like Sirius and Andromeda were. The more we tell her not to do something, the more she'll want to do it. So we stop."

Narcissa laughs. "We stop?" she repeats. "How will that help?"

"How did cutting off Sirius or Andromeda help? Andromeda's gone, and she doesn't seem to be suffering for it."

"Sirius betrayed the Potters in the end."

"Did he? Or did he just take the blame?" Narcissa doesn't answer; she doesn't know, and she's not interested in playing guessing games. "If it was anyone, it was probably the werewolf." Lucius shakes his head. "No, we do the opposite of what your mother and Walpurga tried."

"Which is?"

"They cut ties and tried to cull their black sheep. We can't afford to do that here. So we tell Delphi that we don't care. We're not going to disown her the way her grandmother did. We insist that we're her family and this is her home and we keep it up at least until we're able to prove to the Dark Lord that we did everything we could to try to keep our hold on her. We help her solidify herself as Black's heir, we help her with any of the little projects she comes up with like those glasses she patented, and we do everything in our power to convince her that even if we don't approve of Potter, we are going to continue to support her until the day she changes her mind."

"It won't be enough," Narcissa says. "When the Dark Lord comes back, 'we tried our best' won't be enough to sway him."

"It's better than nothing," her husband says with a finality that she doesn't care enough to fight. "And if we do it well, maybe it will work. Act like nothing in the world would make you happier than having her as your daughter-in-law. Act like you understand her ridiculous choices and are willing to support them. Then slowly start preparing her for the reality of what will happen when the Dark Lord comes back."

It won't work, she wants to tell him. It's too late. She's too far gone. But what would be the point? He won't listen to her. He won't change his mind. And what better plan do they have?

I hope the Dark Lord never comes back, Narcissa thinks—

—then pretends she never did.