The Malfoy Project

𝒯𝑜: 𝒴𝑜𝓊

Dear Stranger, 

My name is Gabriella Rose Ainsley. I am nineteen years old, and I am an Eighth Year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I belong to House Hufflepuff, and during the war, I fought with Dumbledore's Army, after which I wrote for the sports page of the Hogwarts' Digest. I am also the author of this book.

It has been exactly twenty one days since the end of N.E.W.T.s, seventeen days since the Leavers' Ball, and sixteen days since the most unimaginable tragedy has torn my life asunder. I am now writing this from the benches outside Courtroom 8 at the Ministry of Magic, where I await to be called to the stand. 

The short hour I have been forced to sit here has given me more time to think than all of the last two weeks, which have been nothing but a blur; a vivid waking nightmare of indescribable proportions. It is only now, when I can do nothing but sit still and think, that I am hit with a sudden wave of clarity and feel the need to commit my thoughts to paper.

If you have made it this far in the story, I expect you might have done so with extreme frustration and vexation at the occurring events, and the actions and decisions I have made. So, in light of my impending fate which I anticipate with great unhappiness, I think I am finally at liberty to write this letter, to elucidate certain things I think deserve an explanation with regards to all that has happened so far.

The first is this: Sometimes I forgot I was writing a book.

Nothing about it had felt like a job or vocation. And I don't mean this in the same context as an alchemist who loves experimenting, or a Dragonologist riding the thrill of handling the fiery creatures, or an Astronomer staying up for days on end in hopes of catching a fleeting comet.

I mean this book is my life.

All you see on these pages are words; a memoir of a family you have probably only heard about but never met. You have seen their photographs in the papers, read their heinous exploits, heard the gossip in the pubs you congregate at without care or concern about the truthfulness of these stories.

And you would be right to — after all, it does not affect you. When the conversation is over, you will get up and go about your day, and by the time you go to bed, you would have forgotten if it had been two or five Muggle-borns they'd killed and buried in their basement, or if Narcissa had indeed been Voldemort's mistress alongside her sister Bellatrix. 

Like you, I had also been drawn to the mystery. I desired to lift the veil that obscured them just enough for you to keep wanting to know more, and where you cannot know more, to make up your own stories. I love stories, too. I made the decision to work on this book because I wanted a shot at fulfilling my dream of becoming a journalist. The Malfoys were nothing to me but a code to crack, a secret to be exposed and stripped bare to receive the ridicule they deserved.

But at length, it became more and more difficult for me not to see them. They are so real, so painfully human. They have the soft, unmarred flesh of the unworked upper-class, but their skeletons are constructed from a generational suffering so prolonged the calcium has hardened past the point of breakability. Their hearts pump equal parts fear and hope through their veins. Their tears are formed not by anger, but by the familial love they have only ever seen but can never attain.

How can it be possible for them to know love when everything they touch turns to dust?

But I saw Lucius tighten his grip on his cane when he recounted how Voldemort threatened his brother and his wife, caught the terror in his eyes that will linger there for the rest of his life.