Oh hell fine! My hat's going in the ring. It starts long before school. It starts with Lucius becoming a girldad... From the Private Diary of Lucius Malfoy Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire — the 5th of June, 1988 Dracina is eight years old today; and since I cannot sleep, and since it has been my habit for some years to set down in this book whatever I should be unwilling to say aloud and equally unwilling to forget, I shall attempt some account of her. A man who writes of his child at midnight runs a considerable risk of writing nonsense; but I judge that risk the smaller of two, the other being that I should write nothing, and find in ten years’ time that I could no longer recall what she was at eight. I could not be prouder of her. I have written that sentence three times this evening, and twice struck it out in favour of some more measured form of words (such as a father might employ who did not wish to be thought foolish even by himself); but each of the measured forms, read back, was untrue, and the plain sentence is all that is left standing. At dinner today, when Dobby brought in the cake, he set it down a little crooked, so that one of the sugared peacocks which Narcissa had ordered for the top slid down the side and came to rest upon its back in the icing, with its feet in the air. He began at once upon that performance with which every member of this household is acquainted, and had got so far as to seize a candlestick for the purpose, when Dracina said to him, before her mother or I could speak, “Stop that. It’s a peacock, Dobby. Nobody has died. Thank you for the cake.” Then she turned to me, with an air of the most perfect composure, and asked whether that had been correct. I told her that it had; and I believe I told her the truth, though I arrived at the belief slowly, for I could not recollect having said anything of the kind to an elf in the whole course of my life. Her governess is a Rosier, and thinks elves a species of furniture; her mother is kind to them in a general way, and would no more thank one for a cake than she would thank the table for holding it up. She must have had it from somewhere, and I am driven to suppose she had it from me: from some remark of mine, made upon an occasion I have entirely forgotten, about the courtesy a great House owes to those who serve it, which I intended as an ornament and she received as a rule. It is a disconcerting thing, to find that one’s maxims have been believed. It is more disconcerting to find that one’s manner has been believed along with them. A fortnight since, the Parkinsons dined here, and Dracina said something to their girl about her nose so cold, so exactly made, and so entirely unanswerable, that the child was taken home in tears. I reproved her, and she bore it well. I did not tell her that I heard my own voice in every syllable; still less that I understood perfectly the pleasure she had taken in the composition. She has had both from me, the courtesy and the cruelty, and I cannot flatter myself that I chose which she should take. Nor, I think, did I choose for myself what I took from my own father. He was a man of strong opinions and few reasons; or, to speak more fairly of him, he possessed his reasons so completely that it never occurred to him they might require to be stated. From him I learned which tone is proper to a Minister and which to a shopkeeper, how an enemy is to be received at one’s own table, and how a Weasley is to be looked at across a room; and I learned these things as a boy learns the shape of his own hands, so early and so thoroughly that I could not afterwards have told you I had learned them at all. By the time I came of age I wore my station as I wore my name, and with as little reflection. It is commonly said that a daughter softens her father. I grant that I am fonder, which requires no explanation, and gentler, which is less to my credit than it sounds, since a child of five cannot be governed by the methods which suffice for the Wizengamot. But the change of real consequence is that I have grown more serious about my station, and of this the proverb says nothing at all. A child does not permit a man to wear his station without reflection. She asks why of every form he has never examined, and she asks it with the dreadful patience of a person who has nowhere else to be. At Easter she rode out with me to the western edge of the estate, and upon our return she asked, with no appearance of malice and a very great appearance of interest, why the Malfoys, who were the oldest family in Wiltshire, should have tenants whose roofs let in the rain. I answered that the matter was the steward’s concern. She considered this for the length of the avenue, and then asked whose steward he was. I rode out again the next morning, alone, and found that she was right, and more right than she knew; for the western cottages had been neglected through three winters, and the repairs charged to the estate regardless. When I told her afterwards the old rule of our House, which my father gave to me and his father to him, that a Malfoy answers for whatever is done in his name, she said, “Then you have to answer for the roof.” I have answered for it. It cost me forty Galleons and a steward, and I count the price a low one. I found, in short, that I could not answer her as my father had answered me; and a father who will not lie to his daughter must either confess that he does not know, or go and find out. I went down into the old muniment room one afternoon in the winter of 1985, intending to spend an hour there, and I spent the better part of the season. There were wills and letters, and the accounts of old patronage: apprentices paid for, widows pensioned, wands bought for children whose fathers could not afford them. Above all there were the household books of my great-great-grandmother Héloïse, who kept this estate through two bad harvests and a goblin rising. One of them lies open before me now, in a hand so small that I read it with a magnifying charm. At the head of every year’s accounts she has written the same line, non nobis solum nati sumus. She wrote that a great house is a granary, filled in the good years in order that it may be emptied in the bad; and in another place, more shortly, and I think more wisely, that before one gives oneself away one had better have something worth the giving. I copied these out for Dracina, and she has them pinned above her bed. It was in this book that I read her account of the goblin rising, in which she stood at the gates of this house in her nightgown with her wand in her hand and kept them shut three days together, and fed every tenant on the estate out of her own stores while she did it. When I had read it I tried to call to mind a single man of the Dark Lord’s company who would have done the same, and I could not. I believed then, and I believe still, that the cause of the old families was a just cause: that our world is better governed by those who have governed it for centuries than by the newcomers who pour into it every September knowing nothing of its history and caring less; and that our blood, which has carried our gifts down a thousand years, is thinned by every marriage made outside it. I believe also that the cause was served by vulgar men and disgraced by vulgar means, and that I did not keep myself as clear of either as I ought. I have made such arrangements with the Ministry as have kept my family safe. I seldom propose to examine those arrangements, which is itself, I suppose, a fact worth recording. What I meant by the thought about Héloïse I have never been able quite to make out. Narcissa will not read this, and would be displeased by most of it. I may say with entire truth that I love her more now than on the day we married; and I set this down first because what follows might otherwise sound ungracious — namely that we have disagreed over Dracina more often, and more warmly, than over anything else in our lives together. She has lost both her sisters, each in her own manner; and I believe the loss has made her hold the more tightly to what remains. She thinks I make the child too grave. She would have her dance, and sit for her portrait, and be admired, and she says, with justice, that a girl taught nothing but duty will grow up without those graces which make duty tolerable to others. I say that a girl taught nothing but grace will grow up the property of whoever flatters her first. We have compromised, as people do who love one another and the same child: Dracina has a dancing master on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays she sits with me for an hour over the estate books. She likes the Thursdays better. Narcissa says that this is my fault, and it is, and I am proud of it. Dracina will be handsome, rich, and of rank; three things which together have ruined more women than poverty ever did, since each of them invites flattery, and the three together invite it from every quarter at once. I would have her difficult to deceive and difficult to frighten; perfectly civil to an enemy while yielding him nothing; able to command herself before she is permitted to command anyone else. When she meets with a fact which will not fit, I would have her set it upon the mantelpiece and look at it until she understands why it is there, since the facts which will not fit are the only ones that can teach her anything she does not already know. I mean, in a word, to give her so much substance that no one will ever be able to make her merely ornamental. She will be equal to it. She will receive this House from me when I am done with it, and hand it on larger than she received it; and there will not be a family in Britain that does not know her name, nor one that does not wish it had made a better match for its sons. She is asleep now, with Héloïse’s maxims above her head and the sugared peacock, rescued from the icing, upon the table beside her bed. Narcissa tells me that I am a fool about her. Narcissa is entirely correct, and I am going to bed. — L. M.

actually speechless. the greatest timeline.

yep. comments feed algo and ego :) nothing motivates me more than thoughtful comments or questions on my writing. i want to know your thoughts! i want to know that i have brought you pleasure! i wish to provide delight for every yearner i can.

i am pleased to inform everyone: this can happen in real life! when i married @RoseWorthing she went thru the same before i was allowed to help her with chores 😂❤️ the #yearning is for something that really can exist. seek, and may you find likewise! i love you my dove 🥰

entirely correct, she's way better in knee length skirts.

delightful! for everyone to read.