novelraw Chapter 196 196: Purity, Blood and Purebloods
Chapter 196 196: Purity, Blood and Purebloods
A/N: Hello guys, how are you all? Sorry for the late update. Thank you so much for your patience. please comments, and reviews—please keep supporting by giving power stones! Also, please let me know if there are any weird artifacts, wording issues, or unexpected name changes. I'm not sure why, but the AI I use for editing sometimes randomly changes things.
Silence.
A long silence.
A suffocating silence.
Ever since Draco Malfoy had climbed into his family's McLaren F1 — enchanted with a Space-Expansion Charm — he had been smothered beneath his parents' silence. Even after arriving at Malfoy Manor, that lingering, wordless atmosphere followed them all the way to the dinner table.
Draco had imagined many different expressions, attitudes, and reactions from Lucius and Narcissa when they finally faced him — fierce arguments, extreme views, imperious condescension. But he had never anticipated silence.
This silence left him feeling as though he had a fishbone lodged in his throat and a thorn wedged in his side.
He suspected that in this quiet battle of wills, the unspoken rule was: whoever speaks first is most likely to lose.
But he no longer wanted to stay silent.
This silence was neither reasonable nor useful.
Between family members, it seemed wrong to open with a game of strategy rather than honest conversation.
Draco raised his lowered lashes and stole a glance at his parents, whose faces were set like stone.
On a whim, he thought he might try to break through the frost his parents had built between them — perhaps with a touch of Hermione Granger's characteristic honesty and directness.
After he swallowed the last bite of dessert, the smiling house-elves appeared to serve tea, and with it came the Malfoy family's habitual dinner-table conversation, as punctual as the second hand of the bronze-and-silver Gothic spire clock on the table.
Draco closed his eyes, imagined himself a shard of ice, and forced a smile as he made his opening move — directed at his parents, whose expressions were as grave as carved marble: "Mum, the new car is quite something."
"Mm," Narcissa replied, clipped and brief.
"How was your trip to the United States?" he asked.
"Dull," Narcissa said, with an air of cool disdain.
Dull? After visiting so many places and travelling for so many days with such evident enthusiasm, and she says it was dull? Draco's brow twitched almost imperceptibly. He felt the low pressure radiating from her single word.
Deciding to embrace his talent for shamelessness, he pressed on. "Anything new?"
"Do you mean the 'scandalous affair between Draco Malfoy and a Muggle girl' that's been circulating through every pureblood household? Nothing new to anyone else, I'm sure." Lucius raised his cold grey eyes and fixed them on his son with a measured, penetrating stare. "But four months have passed, and we have still received no explanation. To us, it remains rather fresh."
So. Here we are.
Draco had known this topic was inevitable.
Judging by his father's sharp, aggrieved tone, Lucius was particularly displeased that he had not been informed in advance. But what would telling them in advance have changed? Nothing. Their attitude today would have been precisely the same.
"There isn't much to explain." Draco glanced at his father and spoke in a mild, almost offhand tone. "We're together. That's all."
Draco's words drew an offended sound from Narcissa.
She was still shaken by what she'd witnessed that evening — her mind replaying her son's bright, unguarded smile directed at the Muggle girl. And though Draco was still smiling now, his gaze toward them carried a wariness she didn't recognise. It was nothing like the open, genuine joy he had shown that girl.
"This is absurd. Draco, do you understand what you're saying? You're seeing a Muggle girl—" Narcissa's voice was unsteady. She pressed forward, needing to hear it confirmed, even though she already knew the answer. "You — you actually like her?"
"I love her," Draco said, with quiet conviction.
Strangely, he found it rather easy to say those words to his parents — far easier than it had been to say them to Hermione herself, who still couldn't bring herself to say them in return.
Unfortunately, his parents' reaction was not wonder but horror — as though they'd been stung by a Billywig and found no amusement in the sensation whatsoever.
What a waste.
The girl who might have been made to smile by those very words hadn't heard them with her own ears.
Draco thought ruefully that he ought to have said it aloud when he was standing outside the car window — why had he only trusted his lips to form the shapes in silence?
"Love — what a weighted word!" Narcissa said through her teeth, visibly working to maintain her composure. "Draco, have you lost your senses?"
Has it truly gone this far? She pressed her eyes closed briefly in dismay.
This was a thousand times worse than she had feared.
"Youthful infatuation is nothing to be proud of," Lucius said, with deliberate dismissiveness.
He made a show of composure, trying to signal to his wife not to give way to panic.
He lifted his chin and said, with the air of a man settling a trifling matter, "How old are you — fifteen? We were young once as well; we understand this sort of muddled, thoughtless state. Draco, we have been generous. We gave you three, perhaps four months —"
A grace period. Draco stared at his father — whose composed mask was slowly fracturing beneath the surface — and suddenly understood why they had let things go on so long without acting.
They had never intended to accept it.
They had simply been waiting for him to come to his senses.
"That attachment of yours is nothing but youthful folly and a passing surge of emotion. By now, the excitement should have faded, and your head should have cleared. This childish game should be over," Lucius said, fixing his wayward son with a stern glare.
"I'm afraid you'll be disappointed — I'm perfectly serious," Draco replied evenly, though a slow burn of anger had begun to kindle somewhere beneath his ribs.
Youthful folly. Passing surge of emotion. Childish game. That's more than a little insulting.
Seeing no sign of repentance, Lucius gave a cold laugh.
"Serious? That's naivety masquerading as conviction." He reined in his composure with visible effort, reaching for the bearing of a measured, dignified father. "Draco, do you remember your name? Do you remember our family motto? Or — look at the teapot in front of you. The family crest is engraved on it. Read it aloud."
Draco looked at the antique silver-striped teapot, decorated in the medieval style with the Malfoy family crest, and said quietly, "Sanctimonia vincet semper."
(Latin: sanctimonia — purity; vincet — will conquer; semper — always.)
"Now explain it." Lucius's voice was like a cold wind finding its way through a crack in the stone.
"Purity will always conquer," Draco said — the words as familiar to him as breathing, known since before he could properly read.
"And what does 'purity' mean?" Lucius pressed, with a soft, serpentine hiss.
"Pure. Unblemished. Pureblood," Draco said, giving each word its own weight.
"Yes. Pureblood." Lucius's voice shifted, something close to disappointment surfacing beneath the authority. "Do you still remember that you are a pureblood wizard?"
"Yes."
"And is that of no consequence to you?" Lucius asked coldly, something flickering behind his eyes.
"No."
"Very good. Then you will write to that Muggle girl immediately and end it. And you will still be our son." Lucius's voice was slow and deliberate — like a cello played on nothing but its lowest string.
"No."
"You have nerve —" Lucius narrowed his eyes at his son. "Say that again."
"I will not end things with her," Draco said, without flinching.
A barely suppressed fury surfaced in Lucius's eyes.
The mask of patience he'd maintained throughout dinner developed a fracture, and that fracture spread.
Narcissa looked uneasily at her husband and son, both of them balanced on the edge of something irreversible, and decided to intervene before they crossed it.
"Draco —" Narcissa's voice softened, the sharpness giving way to something more measured. "To be honest, we're worried about you. Fifteen is a very young age, and there are things you haven't lived long enough to understand yet. You must trust that we want what's best for you —"
She offered him a small smile, one that couldn't quite conceal the anxiety beneath it.
"That girl is not right for you. Rather than allowing things to develop to the point where you're both left with nothing but regret, it would be far kinder — to everyone — to end it now, before you're in too deep," she said gently.
Draco looked at her and said quietly, "Mum, you know I love you. If you truly care about me — if you truly love me — then trust me enough to respect my choices."
He studied his mother's face — usually serene and composed, now fractured with the kind of worry he hated to put there — and felt the familiar pull of guilt.
She had always doted on him. Since his second chance at life, he had tried his utmost to meet her expectations, to relieve her anxieties, to give her reasons to feel proud. That hadn't changed.
But there was one thing he could not do.
Narcissa was momentarily silenced by the quiet finality of his refusal.
He had never quite refused her like that before. Not so plainly. Not so gently.
He had always been an obedient child — and over the years had become increasingly brilliant and accomplished, which had always filled Narcissa with a quiet, deep satisfaction. He was her finest conversation piece in the salons where other society witches complained about their difficult, unremarkable children. She never needed to elaborate. A modest deflection — "Nothing — simply good breeding" — had always been sufficient.
She hadn't set foot in those salons for three or four months now.
She dreaded seeing those women again. She dreaded their questions.
"And what have you done to raise such a child?"
She would have no answer. Or rather, she would have the same answer as before — "Nothing — simply good breeding" — but now those words would sound less like pride and more like a confession of failure.
Why? Why would her accomplished son repeatedly disrupt the smooth, enviable order of their lives, all for the sake of a Muggle girl?
And why had her once-obedient boy suddenly become so immovably, quietly uncooperative — turning away from her gentle requests even as she fought to stay composed?
Narcissa was overcome with grief, a bitter ache settling deep in her chest like something irretrievable had been spilled.
"That Hermione Granger," she said, her blue eyes moving over Draco's face with a trace of bitterness. "What on earth did she do to turn my son's head so completely?"
Had that Muggle girl slipped him a love potion? Some concoction to make him devoted beyond all reason?
This was the son she had always been able to read — and now, she found, she could not.
Draco studied the changes moving across his mother's expression and thought wryly: she clearly has no warm feelings toward Hermione.
Look at the way her face shifts the moment she says Hermione's name — the automatic flicker of distaste — it's almost reminiscent of the ringleader of Krum's most zealous admirers.
Rita Skeeter had written very little about Hermione in this lifetime, but his mother had already arrived at her verdict without reading a single word.
Draco gave nothing away on his face, but felt a quiet, heavy resignation settle somewhere behind his sternum.
"She didn't do anything," he said. "I pursued her. It was my decision."
"You pursued her?" Narcissa couldn't conceal her disbelief.
That girl managed to make my son — my particular, persnickety son — lower himself and take the initiative?
She knew perfectly well how difficult it was to impress Draco, and how unlikely it was that he would exert himself for someone ordinary. So how had an unremarkable girl so easily caught his attention?
In that moment, Narcissa realised with a small, unsettling shock that she didn't seem to know her son as well as she'd thought.
"You — love—" The word resisted her. She paused, staring at him, and tried a different approach. "What is it about her? What do you actually like?"
What did Draco like about Hermione?
The question gave him pause.
He thought briefly of trying to approach it logically — to reduce it to something quantifiable, like an Arithmancy equation, each component assigned a value and entered into a formula. Or perhaps like casting Scarpin's Revealing Charm on an unknown potion, coaxing its constituent ingredients into the light one by one...
If liking someone could be reduced to such a method, the answer would be simple enough.
But it couldn't.
Whenever he turned the question over in his mind, it didn't resolve into a tidy list. It scattered — like light through leaves on a breezy afternoon in June, fragmentary and restless, impossible to hold in one place.
Perhaps it was the stubborn set of her mouth when she was working through a particularly difficult Transfiguration problem. Perhaps it was the glint of an idea forming in her eyes before she said anything at all. Perhaps it was the stray strand of hair that had once drifted down onto his neck in the wind and made him momentarily forget what he'd been thinking about.
He loved everything that made her her — her temper and her warmth, her stubbornness and her sincerity, her courage, her curiosity, her quiet and relentless aliveness.
If he tried to name every leaf of it, he could be here for days.
A faint, involuntary smile crossed Draco's lips as he turned the thought over — and Narcissa, watching him, found it insufferable.
"Answer me," she said sharply.
His expression steadied.
In the end, he chose three words.
"She understands me."
"Understands you?" Narcissa looked stricken, and then, beneath the hurt, something sharpened into indignation. "And we don't? We don't understand our own son? Did you ever give us a chance? You never said a word to me!"
"Mum — that's not what I meant." Draco exhaled and looked at her directly. "I've spent years trying to be the son you and Father could be proud of. But I'm not a child anymore. Can't you give me a little trust? Can't you respect this one choice?"
"For Merlin's sake, you are still a child! You have no idea what this choice costs you!" Narcissa shook her head, her expression heavy with a certainty she could not shake. "Draco, you two have no future. I can tell you plainly — your father and I will never accept this. What you are doing is squandering your youth and throwing away everything ahead of you."
"Not only his future, but the honour of this entire family — he's disgracing the Malfoy name!" Lucius, whose composure had been wearing thin for some time, finally abandoned it entirely. "Cissy, don't try to reason with him! To fall for a filthy little Mudblood — he's clearly been bewitched, and he's gone along with it willingly!"
Draco had been prepared for his parents' fierceness.
He had never been foolish enough to hope that tonight's conversation would end well.
From the beginning, their words had come at him like cuts — a sharper experience than anything in either of his lives. But he could bear it. All of it. When it became too heavy, he only had to think of Hermione, and it became manageable again.
He had thought, at least, that he could endure the conversation with some measure of restraint.
Until his father used that word.
"Don't use that word in front of me," Draco said, his voice dropping into something cold and very clear.
He was startled, almost faintly, to hear himself echo the exact words Dumbledore had once spoken to him — in another life, at the top of the Astronomy Tower. Those words had lodged themselves somewhere deep in him and never left.
Lucius opened his mouth to retort, but for the first time in his memory, his son cut him off.
"Father." The word was not rude — it was precise. "Words like that change nothing. If anything, they only make you seem beneath yourself."
He said it the way someone might deliver an unwelcome verdict — not cruelly, but without softening.
"You insolent — how dare you interrupt me at my own table?" Lucius gripped the silver snake-head of his cane, his gaze so sharp it could have drawn blood. He looked, in that moment, like a man capable of casting something unforgivable.
Is this really what you can't tolerate, Father? Draco thought, with a cold and private irony. If you had ever lived in a house where someone not only interrupted you at will but would have gladly seen you dead at that same table — and you could do nothing but tremble — this would seem very small.
Draco drew a breath and pressed forward.
"I'm not certain anyone at this table has been observing the niceties of conversation tonight," he said, curling his lip. "You've spent the better part of the evening insulting a girl you've never met, attacking her character based on her birth." He met both their eyes in turn. "So what if she's Muggle-born? On what grounds do you call Muggles 'dirty' and 'lesser'?"
He looked at his parents, who seemed genuinely startled by his shift in tone, and continued more loudly: "You travel throughout the Muggle world freely. You have more than twenty Muggle sports cars in the garage. Our family has made a substantial fortune investing in Muggle currency and Muggle enterprises. And this estate — this very ground beneath us — was granted to our ancestors by the people you call dirty and worthless."
Lucius's expression changed sharply. He parted his lips to respond, but Draco hadn't finished.
"And now you tell me you look down on Muggles?" He exhaled once, steadily, and said what he had been waiting to say for a very long time. "Is it not a little hypocritical — to despise the very people your wealth is built upon?"
Lucius went white.
"You — do you have any idea what you're saying?" His voice shook with fury and something that might have been genuine shock. "This is a disgrace to everything we stand for! You are no son of the Malfoys!"
The silver teapot left Lucius's hand before reason could stop it.
It struck somewhere near Draco, tea cascading across his face and robes, the pot clattering against the marble floor with a sound that split the room's tense silence.
"Don't—!" Narcissa was on her feet at once.
She stepped between them, briefly forgetting whose side she was meant to be on, one hand on Lucius's arm. "Stop it, Lucius — please — stop!"
With trembling hands, she raised her wand and Summoned a ceramic tissue box — peacock blue, trimmed in gilded bronze, embossed with orchids and butterflies — and set it before her son.
"Draco — wipe your face, darling —" she murmured.
"I'm fine, Mum. Sit down, please." His voice was flat and even. He didn't move. His fingers, white-knuckled in his lap, were the only sign he was not entirely composed.
"Why has it come to this — both of you losing your tempers —" Narcissa sat down slowly, pressing her hands together in her lap. "Can we stop here? Just for tonight — can we please stop here?"
"No. If we're going to have this conversation, let's finish it." Draco let the cooling tea trace its path down his jaw. "I should have said all of this a long time ago."
Under his mother's watchful, worried gaze, Draco finally reached for a napkin and pressed it to his face. He wiped the tea away with deliberate, measured movements.
He reined in what remained of his battered dignity, and turned to his father.
"Whether or not I deserve the name Malfoy is not yours to decide, Father," he said, his voice low and controlled. "I am Malfoy by blood, and that is written clearly enough on the family tapestry."
Lucius made a sharp sound of derision, his gaze venomous — waiting with barely concealed contempt for whatever his son would say next.
"In the word 'purity,' the idea of pureblood is actually third — preceded by 'pure' and 'unblemished.'" Draco's expression had gone very calm. "Has anyone at this table stopped to consider what those words originally meant? Were they ever only about bloodline?"
"Bloodline is the foundation upon which this family's interests rest!" Lucius snapped. "Do I truly need to explain that to you?"
Draco turned the napkin idly in his hands and said, unhurried, "If we're speaking of bloodline, then in the long history of the Malfoy family, certain of our ancestors proposed to Muggle queens. Others married Muggles outright. Others were recorded as showing marked favour toward Muggles." He raised his eyes to meet his father's and allowed a faint edge into his voice. "What leads you to believe that only the doctrine of purebloods has been passed down? That everything else was simply discarded and forgotten?"
Yes — since his rebirth, Draco had not wasted his time idly, nor had he wasted the library that Hermione had long coveted. During the long, quiet nights he had spent among those shelves, he had read deeply — including the Malfoy family genealogy, from which he had drawn conclusions his father had apparently never wished to find.
Before the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy came into force in 1692, the Malfoy family had maintained extensive ties to Muggle high society. The Muggle antiques and works of art displayed throughout Malfoy Manor were the evidence: most of them had been gifts from Muggle royalty and nobility — a testament to a relationship that predated the family's current convictions by centuries.
Narcissa had gone very still in her armchair.
She was looking at her son with an expression she could not quite name.
Just now, he had called her "Mother" — formally, not the familiar "Mum" she was used to. A small thing, and yet it struck her oddly, like a door swinging quietly shut.
It occurred to her, with a cold, creeping discomfort, that she was looking at a Draco she hadn't known existed. Not her Draco — not the little boy she had raised, shaped by the Malfoy family's principles and the Black family's traditions, who had grown up eating and breathing the faith in pure blood from the very beginning.
Who had taught him to think this way?
Not the girl — surely. These ideas were too deeply researched, too carefully formed, to have come from a teenage girl with no wizarding history to speak of.
Perhaps a professor at school. Not Severus — half-blood though he was, he remained staunchly Slytherin at heart. More likely Albus Dumbledore, with his peculiar enthusiasm for unorthodox students...
Narcissa stared at her son and ran through possibilities.
Then she noticed his eyes.
Grey, and cold, and utterly resolved — the same particular look she had last seen, years ago, in the face of Sirius Black. The same self-conviction. The same fearlessness. The same unshakeable sense of his own rightness.
Dear Merlin. Was she fated to repeat Aunt Walburga's grief? A child who walked out and never came back — estranged, unreachable — his life careering away into something unrecognisable?
She would not allow it. She would not.
Meanwhile, Lucius's jaw had gone tight.
He had stopped reaching for things to throw. Instead, he said, with clipped ferocity, "You foolish boy. That was then — things have changed! When the Statute of Secrecy was enacted, the Malfoy family chose to adapt. It was a matter of sound judgement."
"Judgement," Draco repeated. "So the family's commitment to pureblood ideology was never a matter of true belief — it was a matter of pragmatic interest?" He looked at his father steadily. "And now you've followed that path so long that you've forgotten the family began somewhere else entirely? What gives you the standing to look down on Muggle-borns, when the Malfoys themselves were never as pure as you've chosen to remember?"
Lucius's restraint collapsed entirely.
"Don't you dare lecture me! You arrogant, ungrateful child!" he said, breathing hard. "You read a few old genealogy records and think you can overturn generations of conviction? You think you can justify your own choices by rifling through history?"
His voice hardened further, the disappointment in it now unmistakable.
"Draco Malfoy. You have been sheltered and indulged your entire life. You have no real understanding of what it means to navigate this world. And you have no appreciation — none — for what it has cost me to build what this family has."
"And what does that world look like," Draco said softly, watching his father's face, "to someone whose view of it has never been free of self-interest?"
Lucius Malfoy felt a dull, thudding ache behind his eyes.
The teapot had been the first thing he had ever thrown at his son. It had given him no satisfaction. It had brought him no relief. It was, on reflection, undignified — and utterly unlike him.
He prided himself on being composed, hard-headed, unsentimental — generous only with Narcissa, in ways he never allowed the world to see. But in this moment, there was a hollow pressure behind his ribs that he could not name properly and refused to examine.
Alongside it, a fury he could not fully master.
He gripped the edge of the table instead of the teapot.
And yet Draco remained calm. His eyes were clear. He didn't look angry — he looked certain. He looked like someone who had thought all of this through long before tonight, who had arrived at this table already knowing what he would say and how he would say it.
A fifteen-year-old boy, with the calm nerve of a man twice his age, dismantling his father's arguments one by one.
That, Lucius found, unsettled him more than any outburst could have.
He wasn't frightened of a hot-headed son — that could be managed. What he found harder to dismiss was this: a son who had clearly been prepared.
"Throw it if you like, Father," Draco said, looking at the teapot still within his father's reach, his voice quiet and even. "I still won't agree with you. You could throw it a dozen times and it wouldn't change a thing." He met his father's eyes. "If it would help — you could smash it against my face."
Lucius stared at his son.
The composure there — cold and unrelenting — reignited his anger even as it confounded it. He gritted his teeth, reaching for words sharp enough to dent the boy's certainty.
Before he found them, Narcissa intervened.
"Enough!" She abandoned her usual measured tone and said it sharply, with a finality that cut across both of them. "I think we've all said quite enough for one evening."
She was in turmoil — stricken with worry and exasperation in equal measure, pulled between her anger at Draco's stubbornness and the fear squeezing her chest at the thought of where this could end.
She knew how these arguments went, when they went badly. She had seen it happen once before — a proud, self-righteous boy walking out of his family home in the middle of a row, never to walk back in as a son. Drifting into dangerous company. Ending up in Azkaban during the years that should have been the best of his life.
She would not let that happen to her son.
Narcissa glanced at the gilded bronze clock on the table, as though noticing for the first time how late the hour had grown.
"Draco, it's very late. Go to your room and rest. I need to speak to your father." She kept her voice as level as she could, though urgency crept beneath it.
Her son didn't move. He sat there, looking at his father with an expression of absolute immovability — which happened, she noticed unwillingly, to be the same expression that Lucius wore when he'd made up his mind about something.
She exhaled.
Under the table, she pressed her hand over Lucius's, quietly. She looked at her husband with an expression that asked, without words, for a little patience — and something in his icy composure shifted, fractionally.
"You may go," Lucius said to his son, the words cold but controlled. "We'll speak tomorrow."
Narcissa looked at Draco — her son, with his steady face and his quiet sadness and his jaw set like stone — and said softly, "Go and rest, Draco. You must be tired. Whatever else there is to say, it can wait until morning."
He nodded to her — once.
He rose, straightened his back, and pushed open the heavy carved door.
He walked out without a smile, without a goodnight.
His silhouette looked unfamiliar.
He never looked back.