The Malfoy Project

𝙻𝚞𝚌𝚒𝚞𝚜 #𝟷 - 𝙱𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝙰𝚛𝚖𝚜

     'Malfoy' was my very first word.

     Not 'Mum' or 'Dad', although it may not have been considered entirely proper to call them that, anyway. In the Malfoy household, we addressed our parents as 'Mother' and 'Father'.

     My father, Abraxas Malfoy, was an honourable and respected man, or so he always reminded me. Your father is a very important man, he'd say. One day, he's going to be Minister for Magic. Lucius Malfoy, son of the Minister for Magic. How would you like that?

     For the longest time, I believed him. Father would disappear for hours on end, either to his study or someone else's office, leaving my mother, brother, and I to our own devices. In fact, I saw so little of him I barely can recall his face now.

     Mother took it rather well, I suppose. Athena Malfoy was a woman of little words, much like the rest of the Rosier family. Some of my earliest memories were of her lounging about the house dressed in these glorious silk dresses, in every hue of green possible. They would always be cinched tightly at the waist, with long sleeves and a low back. I loved being carried by her because the material would feel cool against my skin, like swimming in a creek.

     She was fairly stern, and chastised us for every little noise we'd make. Running in the house was not tolerated in the slightest, so my brother and I would take to the gardens to entertain ourselves.

     Mother never came with us. The sun hurts my eyes, she would say. It was our housekeeper, a house elf named Pepper, who would bring my brother and I outside to play. At the time, the gardens were almost twice their size, with orange and apple orchards, fields, and gigantic marble fountains - because everything had to be made of marble or you weren't really rich.

     There wasn't much to do in the gardens themselves, so we'd use every opportunity to sneak outside its perimeters. The most fun part of it all was coming up with new and ingenious ways to escape Pepper's watchful eye. We derived some sort of childish pleasure from disappearing from sight, chuckling as we lost ourselves in the massive space beyond the gardens.

     We spent hours wading through the streams, or playing hide-and-seek near the pasture, or hunting for Flitterby moths, or pretending to be wolves watching the cows and sheep.

     Father wasn't particularly happy about us playing outside; said we might 'catch bad influence'. From who, I really didn't know since we rarely had anyone over. The only visitors we had were men in long black cloaks with permanent frowns etched onto their faces. They always came in pairs or threes, kissed my mother's hand in greeting, then went straight to my father's study and shut the door.

     It's Father's Ministry friends, I would whisper to my brother every time. Sebastian - his full name was Lycus Sebastian but we called him Bas - never shared my excitement.

     "Father's doing bad things," he told me once. When I asked what sort of bad things, he shrugged his shoulders and pretend not to have heard me.

     The men would re-emerge hours later, and their expressions when they came out would determine if Bas and I would get beaten that day or not.

     Father used his cane; a family heirloom fashioned from blackthorn wood and weighted with silver at both ends. He would beat our backs and thighs raw, sometimes till the skin split open.

     Bas would cry. I wouldn't, although sometimes I pretended to just so he would stop.

     You see, the difference between Bas and I was that Bas never seemed to understand why father acted this way.