Bad Faith

Prologue

Pride and Purpose

Nearly all men can stand adversity;

if you want to test a man's true character, give him power.

- Abraham Lincoln

* * *

Lucius Malfoy was not an easy man to break.

He knew this, and Voldemort knew this. He wasn't an easy man to find, either, especially when he didn't want to be found. Having a net worth of almost a billion Galleons tended to help with that sort of thing.

Lucius was a man of devious intent and vast influence. He wanted to be powerful, and therefore, he was. He wanted to be wealthy, and so he was filthy rich. He wanted to help ensure the survival of pure-blood lineage, and that was the main reason he joined the side of the Dark Lord. And then, for the first time in his life, Lucius discovered what it felt like to have someone like himself in charge of him, and he did not enjoy it. He had become a Death Eater to gain more power, not to surrender it and all of his dignity for another man's supremacy.

But as a powerful man, he was also flawed. Great men cared for power and nothing else; everything besides their personal interests is secondary. Lucius fooled himself into believing that he fulfilled this criterion for a while, even after being married to Narcissa for many years. Even when she informed him that finally she was pregnant, that this time the doctor had told her it was a healthy baby, and her chances of a miscarriage were slim, he still had himself convinced that it was secondary, and that Lucius Malfoy and his agenda was priority number one.

All of this came crashing down around him when the nurse plopped a small lump of blankets that turned out to be his son, into his arms.

It took Lucius about seven years to come to grips with this thing he refrained from referring to as 'love' that he felt for his son. The resemblance was striking. Draco looked just like him, everyone said so, and he was rapidly acquiring the same tone and vocabulary. On Draco's ninth birthday, Lucius gave him his first family heirloom, an ornate ring made of silver with the family crest on it. Draco had to wear it on a chain around his neck, because his fingers were still too small for it to fit.

Later, Draco had looked hopefully up at his father and asked, 'Does this make me a real Malfoy now?'

Lucius had smiled down at him. 'And don't let anyone ever take that away from you.'

In most cases, Draco had continued to live up to his expectations since then, although Lucius very rarely acknowledged it. He knew the only way for his son to succeed was to constantly believe he had failed. Narcissa told him once that he would regret not recognising his son's accomplishments more often, and Lucius responded by telling her that that was her job.

Still, he (for lack of a better word) loved his son very much. Whether it was purely paternal or for his own, selfish interests was unimportant; either way, the fact remained that he cared for his son.. This wouldn't have caused any difficulties if Voldemort hadn't decided he'd had enough of the quiet life and sprung back into action when Draco was about to turn fifteen. Now, Lucius had a weakness. His son was both his heir and a liability, and the Dark Lord knew it.

Azkaban had been a bit inconvenient, but not intolerable now that the Dementors were gone. Not quite a year inside and Avery had managed to get his hands on a wand and, well... it was a very messy evening, to say the least, and Lucius had embraced freedom once more.

And then, not three days later, Severus delivered Draco to his father because he had been unable to kill Dumbledore, as was his duty. It was then that Lucius decided once and for all that he was tired of having to worry about liabilities. He had also tried very hard to ignore the fact that it was his son that was clinging to his robes like that, shaking and pale, looking weak and defeated like no Malfoy should ever have allowed himself to look.

Draco had said to him, 'I just couldn't do it, father. I'm sorry.'

Lucius had shaken him very hard by the shoulders, telling him very firmly that he had failed only himself, and that he had no more obligation to the Dark Lord then he did to Harry Potter. Draco had stopped crying immediately, and this had calmed Lucius's temper quite a bit. It was in a much calmer manner that he explained to his son that Voldemort was going to kill the lot of them anyway, whether he had succeeded in killing Dumbledore or not--failing to do so just sped the process up.

Hiding Draco and Narcissa had been easy enough, as the Malfoy Manor was already Unplottable, but on top of that, the bond of blood Lucius made with his son made the Manor a safe haven for them both as long as Lucius was alive. Complicated though the spell was, Lucius was capable of far more powerful magic and had sealed it with ease. The hard part was going to be keeping himself alive, to ensure it stayed in place. Even without the blood bond, the Manor was strongly protected--even the best in the Ministry would find it near impossible to disarm. Unfortunately, the Dark Lord was more than capable of dealing with the darkest, most ancient of magic, so once the bond was destroyed there would be very little keeping him out.

Lucius had expected to avoid him just long enough to give Draco time to prepare. A couple months, maybe--a year if they were lucky.

It took almost four years for Voldemort to finally catch up to him, and frankly, Lucius was pretty disappointed with him.

*

Voldemort was not an easy man to fool.

He knew this, and Lucius Malfoy knew this. He wasn't an easy man to hide from, either, especially when he particularly wanted to find somebody. Being the most powerful wizard alive helped him quite a bit in accomplishing this sort of thing.

That's why Lucius knew he couldn't run forever, and knew that no matter how solid his resolve, the Dark Lord would suck the information out of him.

What Voldemort failed to understand was why it had come to this with Lucius. He had been such a handy little follower, with all of his inside contacts and vast amount of resources. And he had produced an even handier heir, who was shaping up to be a rather promising servant himself, even if he was a bit of a coward. After all, Wormtail was the most cowardly creature Voldemort had ever had the misfortune of meeting, and look how useful he turned out to be.

It must be the inbreeding, Voldemort had decided. The dwindling gene pool pure-bloods had to choose from these days was beginning to affect their intelligence. This resolution was only further enforced when Lucius actually tried to make a run for it. Oh, he got a very good head start, and Voldemort had to appreciate just how annoyingly slippery the man was when he wanted to be. Plus, what with world domination on his agenda, Voldemort had very little free time to track down defective supporters, so it wasn't surprising that Lucius got away with it for as long as he did.

Voldemort tried to look at it from a brighter point of view, concluding that, as the Malfoy family had evaded destruction for so long, they had surely formed a false sense of security, and therefore his revenge would be even sweeter.

Voldemort was very disappointed.

Lucius managed to keep his pride despite the circumstances. He sat there, smoking, and looking extremely obnoxious and dignified for a man who was about to be ripped limb from limb by a bloodthirsty werewolf.

It was disturbing, to say the least, to have the twenty-something face of Tom Riddle turn around and glare at you. The Dark Lord had been so snake-like, so inhuman when he'd first emerged five years ago that Lucius could have sworn that the damage was irreversible. Now, a young man stared at him from across the room, with black hair, handsome features and dark, dangerous eyes.

Fenrir growled hungrily at him, and Lucius gave him a pained look. 'Save it, furball, you'll get your turn.'

'I'm very disappointed with you,' Voldemort said finally, ignoring Greyback, who was beginning to foam at the mouth. 'You have failed me far too many times, Lucius.'

Lucius tapped his cigarette. 'What else is new?'

'It's really such a shame to see another pure-blood line come to an early end,' Voldemort continued as if he hadn't been interrupted. He gave the werewolf a look of mock regret, 'Don't you agree, Fenrir?' And with a flick of his wand, he removed the Body-Bind that held the animal down

Lucius silently congratulated himself on making it this far and hoped to Hell that Draco would have better luck then he had.

* * *

What assurances do I have that your parenting isn't screwing me up?

- Calvin and Hobbes

* * *

When Draco first turned sixteen, he made a vow to himself that he would not reach seventeen as a virgin. Looking back at this on his twenty-first birthday, he decided that, with this rather juvenile resolution, he must have jinxed himself somehow, and he continued to mope about it for the remainder of the month. He began to wonder whether it was worth sneaking out of the house and risking the wrath of the Dark Lord in order to remedy his virginal status; indeed, he was almost obsessed with the thought... until the evening his father's Valaetas went out.

The Malfoy Valaetas was one of the many family heirlooms that the Manor housed. It was a simple device; a small, clear glass sphere within which a flame representing the life of the current patriarch was suspended. If the subject was happy and in good health, the large flame would burn brightly; if the subject was ill, the flame would be smaller, and if they were in mortal danger, it would flicker. For past several years, Lucius Malfoy's flame had fluctuated between the three. And then one night, when the weather had been particularly violent outside the Manor, it had flickered dangerously before disappearing in a wisp of smoke.

Reality had smacked Draco in the face that night--he could not believe that something as trivial as getting laid had somehow managed to overshadow the much more important issue of 'Fuck, now what?'

This is so typical of my life, Draco thought savagely. Leave it to fate to produce him with such an ironic and humiliating situation--die at the hands of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, or seek salvation from the one person in the world he could never ask for help.

Go to Potter. The urgent words echoed in his head, overlapping to the point that he couldn't hear himself think anymore. Nobody else. You have to go to Potter.

Well, fuck that, said his pride.

You really don't have any other choice, said his logic.

Draco told the voices in his head to shut the bloody hell up so he could think. What he really needed was a Door #3, even if it meant forfeiting the family fortune and committing himself to the life of a monk, or something; anything--he needed another option. Unfortunately, despite how long he thought about it, he couldn't find a way out. All he had was the door to Certain Doom, and the door to Harry Potter.

The Malfoy family had to be cursed, he decided, and this was proof. No matter what Draco did or how hard he tried, reality continued to ruin his life.

'Draco? Darling, you look terrible, are you sure you're alright?'

'Mum, don't.' Draco's fingers laced together, squeezing so hard his knuckles turned white.

His mother was sitting across from him on the loveseat, stroking the long white fur of her Maine Coon, who stared reproachfully at him with her mismatched eyes. This was what his mother tended to do when she was nervous, something that had become a habit over the past few months. Narcissa also had grown a lot thinner recently, and Draco had been alarmed to see that age was beginning to affect her. They couldn't go on like this. It couldn't even be considered living.

Maybe he could smuggle them out of the Manor--they had property in several different countries they could use. The flat in Greece, the house in Venice... they could go to that bungalow in Port Elizabeth if they had to. They could even buy new property somewhere else, somewhere He wouldn't know about, somewhere far away from this place where they could just pretend there was no war, that they had nothing to do with the bloody mess....

All of this was wishful thinking, though, and not productive, so he pushed it out of his mind. He knew what he had to do, what he was going to do; he just had to do it.

Easier said than done, he soon realized, as his willpower to move was surprisingly lacking. His pride and logic still seemed to be locked in a furious battle over his body mechanics, because he tried to stand up and sit down at the same time, and ended up slamming his fists back down on the table, causing the cat to hiss and jump out of his mother's lap.

'Sweetheart, you don't have to do this if you don't want to,' she said sympathetically, leaning over and putting her hand on his shoulder. 'We'll be fine for a while; the magic is old, and very strong, even your father didn't understand the full extent of its power. We could be safe here for quite some time.'

'That's not the point,' he told her. 'I promised--'

'You promised to take care of us,' she told him sharply. 'And to be honest I don't see what good this will do. It will just expose us, take us away from here--they can't protect us any better then Lucius did.'

'I am not going to spend my life hiding!' Draco stood up so quickly his chair crashed to the floor. Nivens instantly appeared and righted the chair, causing Draco to snarl and knock it over again on purpose. The house-elf to squeaked and vanished as quickly as he'd come. 'I am tired of sitting around in this house just waiting for it!'

His mother regarded him quietly with a very severe look that instantly made him feel guilty for shouting. She stood up after a moment and walked around the table, and hugged him from behind. He went limp in her arms, suddenly feeling very tired.

'I have to do this. I have to do something--'

'I know,' she said gently.

'And if they take me, you'll still be here; you'll be fine until I can figure something else out. I'll--I'll work it out, I promise.' He sounded less like he was reassuring her than himself. 'I won't leave you here.'

'I have faith in you,' she said and gave him a small squeeze. 'Please don't fret, darling.'

Draco eventually said goodbye to his mother and gathered his wand and cloak before going outside. He would have to walk outside the protective perimeter before he'd be able to Apparate. Passing the gardens and the paddock, he watched the wind pushing the long grass back towards home, pushing against him, as if trying to keep him in. The horses were restless, galloping back and forth along the length of the fence, lifting their heads high and neighing loudly. Thunder rumbled overhead and they knew the rain was coming.

The large, black gates that marked the entrance to the property grew steadily closer as he trudged on, opening silently as he reached them, releasing him from the safety of their bounds. He reached into his cloak retrieved a small, sealed leather pouch, and ran his wand along its edge, unlocking the magic that had kept it secret for so long. Pulling out the fragment of parchment, he read the narrow handwriting carefully, memorizing what it said quickly before it erupted in flames and the ashes blew away with the wind.

He took one last look at the Manor, glowing luminously in the darkness, before taking a heavy breath and disappearing with a snap.

*

About seventy miles away and an hour later, another werewolf was sleeping off his special monthly hangover after a chaotic night of turning into rabid, hairy canine that rips the legs off anything that moves. It was tiresome, really, and said werewolf would have really liked to finish sleeping it off, but the knocking on the door just became louder and louder until it woke up the portrait of Mrs. Black. Very, very stiffly, he moved out into the hall to slam her curtains shut and padded down the stairs, really wishing that the whole werewolf-phobia would kick in for whoever was on the other side of the door.

After all, Remus Lupin was used to being avoided. He would go as far as to say that he had accepted it. What really irked him was the way people insisted on feeling sorry for him anyway. He liked to think he gave people a lot of slack, especially those he considered his friends. But for some reason most of the people he knew seemed to think he wanted their sympathy, as if a lifetime of feeling sorry for himself hadn't made him get over it.

Yes, he was a werewolf. Yes, all of his best friends were dead. Yes, he was cursed with an eternity of being the outcast of society. So what he wanted--what he actually wanted--was company, not sympathy. Because frankly, he was sick of the pity; it was starting to piss him off.

When he opened the door, he had planned to tell Tonks that he didn't need her there if she was just going to make him feel guilty about it later--namely, by crying to Molly about how hard it was to deal with someone you loved when they turned into a rampaging beast of blood and death once a month. He also intended to tell her that all females were inherently werewolves anyway, only instead of growing hairy and bleeding others, they grew irritable and bled themselves; however, they were just as foul and worthy of exorcism from society.

It took him a few seconds to realise that the person outside his door was not Tonks after all, unless she had grown a lot blonder and paler since the last time he saw her.

'Morning, Professor,' the young man said cheerfully. 'Potter wouldn't happen to be around, would he?'

Unsure of what to say, Remus just settled for gaping, because he had no idea how else to deal with a very desperate looking Draco Malfoy on the doorstep of number twelve, Grimmauld Place.

Thirty minutes and three cups of coffee later, Draco had told him everything that had happened; the bond of blood, the death of his father, the wrath of the Dark Lord and all that jazz.

Remus listened to his story through to its completion. He wasn't afraid of Draco, he was more concerned about how he had managed to find out where Headquarters were. After all, if this were an ambush, he'd be dead already. Plus, if he called in the Ministry, they would probably have chucked the boy in Azkaban so fast he'd never get to hear the explanation. And damn it all, he was curious.

'So as you can imagine,' Draco said finally, 'I couldn't stay there for long. The only other place he can't find me is here.'

Remus voiced his curiosity regarding how he had managed to find them, and Draco gave him a very tired sort of look and said, 'Dumbledore, of course.'

'Dumbledore's dead,' Remus told him.

'Catching up with current events, are you?' Somehow, being on the run from You-Know-Who didn't keep Malfoys from retaining at least a part of their superiority complex. 'He gave it to Snape to pass on to me, should I ever need it. I hadn't even looked at it until this morning.'

Remus had decided that this was a satisfactory explanation, and since Draco had already proven he was able to infiltrate Headquarters, it really didn't matter how, only that he could. Luckily, as Dumbledore had died the Secret-Keeper, Draco wouldn't be able to tell anyone else where the Headquarters was located, only access it himself.

As it turned out, Draco not only believed that he was safe at Grimmauld Place, but was terrified at the thought of turning himself in. As far as he knew, he'd earned a death sentence from the Ministry of Magic and was in no hurry to die in his prime, thank you very much. Remus decided that the best thing now would be to summon Arthur Weasley, as he was sure that he would know what to do.

Draco was horrified at the idea.

'A Weasley,' he exclaimed. 'You might as well feed me to a Hippogriff! I'm trying to get off the hook, not do myself in!'

It took a lot of convincing (and a fair bit of Firewhisky in Draco's coffee) to calm him down enough to explain that Arthur was, in fact, a very reasonable and fair man and Remus was sure that he would have Draco's best interests at heart and do whatever he could to help. Draco tried to point out that this logic was flawed as Arthur had brutally assaulted his father in Flourish & Blotts some years ago and was bound to be just a little upset about that near-death-by-snake-bite incident, but Remus assured him he was just being paranoid.

'That's why I'm still alive!' Draco informed him, and topped up his coffee with more alcohol.

Arthur Weasley arrived on the scene, and Remus filled him in while Draco filled himself with more Firewhisky. Arthur took it rather well, and asked Draco if he could have some.

'You may not,' Draco told him sternly, 'unless you promise me that if I go to prison, I get conjugal visits and a private bath.' This made Arthur laugh, which seemed to make Draco feel at least marginally better.

Overall, it had been the most exciting morning Remus had had in quite a while, and he invited Draco to come back any time he wished, provided the Ministry didn't throw him in Azkaban.

*

To be continued...