The Theory of Magic: The Vanishing Hall (Year 2)

1 | Good Wizards & Bad Wizards

Lucius Malfoy was not a good wizard.

Nor was he a particularly bad wizard, despite the rumors stirred by the riffraff and bandied by the Wizengamot. He was a Malfoy, the Malfoy now that his father Abraxas had passed on, and there was absolutely nothing Lucius valued more than his family, his name, and—perhaps—the shining Malfoy vaults buried deep in Gringotts' mines. As a certain Dark Lord always proclaimed, there was no such thing as good and evil, only power, and the Malfoys had power in political spades.

No, Lucius had no love for Muggles and yes, he did think pure-bloods were superior to their contemporaries—but Lucius was not a raving radical like some chose to believe. He despised Muggles and thought of them as rude, cretinous wretches who continually hopped the fence at the rear of his property where the wards were the weakest and more than once injured the Malfoy steeds at the stable, but he found no pleasure in torturing them. Like tearing wings off a butterfly, it seemed only cruel, pointless—a waste of time. Lucius hated wasting time.

His father had been the first to bend the knee to the man who became the Dark Lord, a man who promised the ambitious Malfoy heir more money, more prestige, more influence—more, more, more. Abraxas had gone to school with him, had sat in his classes, had been the first of the inner circle before their lord took to calling them Death Eaters. Abraxas had indoctrinated a blind fealty for the Dark Lord in Lucius from his earliest days, never stating the man's true name, never speaking of him in anything but a hushed whisper of awe. Lucius even met the Dark Lord several times as a lad, and he could clearly recall how each subsequent visit had torn away some facet of humanity in the Dark Lord until he'd appeared sallow and red-eyed and sharp of teeth.

Lucius remembered watching him torture Abraxas in the parlor one night and the memory always made him sick.

So, when the time came to proffer his left arm and his loyalty, there really hadn't been another choice for Lucius, not that he'd desired another option at the time. It had been an honor to be chosen, to have the Dark Lord give you a loving pat on the head and send you out for some Muggle-baiting. Lucius hadn't cared either way, really. He found the sport taxing at best and utterly disgusting at worst: no offense to his lovely wife, but her sister Bellatrix had been a bloody madwoman long before the Dementors got their filthy hands on her. In those days, being a pure-blood meant doing as the Dark Lord said: you either obeyed, or you died, and he very much liked being alive.

Lucius had watched his father pour buckets of Galleons into the Dark Lord's hands and hadn't said a word. He hadn't said a word when they sold their second manor in the north, or when Abraxas started letting out the lands in France—but Lucius wasn't blind, for Merlin's sake. For years he watched the Dark Lord promise his family bigger and greater things while Abraxas fed the man vast rivers of gold to fuel his agenda. Pure-blood supremacy would have been very nice indeed—had the Dark Lord been able to deliver it. If he hadn't sent half of the pure-blood families into early graves. If he hadn't created so many extant female lineages, the name of most noble houses were lost forever.

There were barely any pure-bloods left to rule over the rabble.

Then the Dark Lord went and lost everything at the hands of a toddler—a half-blood baby with a Mudblood for a mother—placing Lucius and his family in a very sticky situation as his prime benefactors. Lucius could still feel the sting of humiliation and defeat twelve years later. People still spoke the name of Malfoy with a slight twist to their lips, either to sneer or laugh despite a decade of hard political maneuvering and quick financial investments to repair Abraxas' mistakes. To say Lucius was unimpressed with Lord Voldemort was an understatement. He was a Malfoy, after all.