Author's Note:
I've never written fiction before. I've been a reader my whole life — fantasy novels, fanfiction, anything with good worldbuilding and characters who feel real — but I never thought I'd be on this side of it. Writing always felt like something other people were good at. Turns out the gap between "I could never do that" and "well, I'm doing it" is smaller than I thought. These two chapters are my first attempt at starting a story. It's slow, it's character-heavy, and it probably shows that I'm new at this. More chapters will come — I just can't promise a schedule yet. If you enjoy it, I'd love to hear it. If you have feedback, I'll take it — just keep in mind you're reading a first-timer's first pages. Please be kind — I'm very much still learning as I go.
Story premise:
Draco Malfoy SI | AU | Hogwarts starts at 14 | Slow Burn | No Bashing
A soul merge self-insert wakes up as Draco Malfoy. No system, no cheat sheet — just a new person shaped by two lives, trying to fix a family that doesn't know it's broken, survive a war that hasn't started yet. Heavy on character and politics, light on action (for now). Eventual slow burn romance. This is not a power fantasy and nobody gets bashed — not even the people who deserve it.
Malfoy Manor — Spring 1977
It was the silence of a house that had never needed to raise its voice.
Malfoy Manor stood on its hill the way old things stand — not because anyone willed it, but because nothing had yet found the authority to move it. With hands three centuries dead having cut and placed each stone, the walls possessed that specific chill of rooms designed for impressing, not for comfort, and the stones themselves were pale and precise. The dining room was the heart of this, or perhaps the opposite of a heart — a long, high-ceilinged chamber where candlelight reached upward and stopped, swallowed by the dark above the chandeliers. The table could seat twenty. Tonight, as every night, it seated two.
This was the first silence. The silence of stone and silver and empty chairs. The silence of portraits watching from gilt frames with the disinterested patience of the ancient. It was not a hostile silence — nothing so active as that. It was the silence of a place that had been grand for so long it had forgotten that grandeur was a choice. Tapestries hung along the east wall, their greens gone deep and strange with age. A fire burned in the fireplace at the far end of the room. It did not make the room warm.
Lucius Malfoy sat at the head of the table, his back to the tall, narrow windows that admitted no direct light. He ate the way he did most things — with an economy of motion that made elegance look inevitable. His knife never scraped the plate. His wine glass returned to the same spot each time he set it down, as though the table had a mark only he could see. There was, in fact, a faint silver inlay there — not decorative, but functional — one of several such markings worked into the table generations ago, invisible unless you knew to look for them. He did not look up, because there was nothing to look up at that he had not already measured and found in its proper place.
He was not unkind, as such. That was the thing one had to understand about Lucius Malfoy, and the thing most people got wrong. He was not withholding warmth to punish anyone. He simply had a certain amount of it, less than some men and more than others, and most of it went to the maintenance of things he considered important — the estate, the name, the careful architecture of influence he had spent years constructing. What remained was enough for the quiet respect he showed his wife, the glass of wine he poured her before his own, the fact that he always stood when she entered a room. If that was not love, it was at least its nearest available neighbour, and in the houses of old families, one learned not to be too precise about the difference.
This was the second silence. The silence between two people who had said everything that duty required and nothing that it didn't. Narcissa sat at her place — not at the far end of the table, which would have been theatrical, but four seats down, which was simply correct. She ate less than he did and with the same unconscious grace; her movements were so composed they barely displaced the surrounding air. Her hair was pale and drawn back from her face in a way that might have looked severe on another woman.
She did not try to fill the silence. She never had. Narcissa Black had not been raised to chatter, and Narcissa Malfoy saw no reason to begin. If there was something between them that a different kind of couple might have called loneliness, she would not have used that word. She had a husband who respected her, a home that bore a name as old as her own, and something else besides — something she carried with her even now, visible beneath the fall of dark fabric across her lap, present and unmentioned in how important things often were in this house.
She was six months along, or near enough. The pregnancy had changed nothing about the way they dined. Lucius had not moved his chair closer. Narcissa had not asked him to. A healer visited on Tuesdays, and the nursery was being prepared in the east wing, and these were simply facts — handled with the same quiet efficiency as every other matter of the household. They did not discuss the child at dinner. They discussed little at dinner.
Lucius set down his glass. "The east wing plasterwork," he said without looking up. "Fawley's men finished the cornice today. I've told them to begin the ceiling moulding tomorrow."
It wasn't, in the strict sense, about the nursery. The topic was the house and its upkeep, presented as routine estate matters. That the room was being prepared for their child was not the main point. Or at least, that's how he presented it.
Narcissa considered this. "The green," she said. "For the walls. I've chosen the Malfoy sage rather than the darker shade."
"A good choice," Lucius said. He picked up his wineglass again.
That was the whole of it. A room discussed in terms of plaster and paint. Two people circling the same unspoken thing — the child, the change it would bring, what kind of family they intended to be — and settling, by mutual instinct, for the safe language of logistics. If there was a moment when one of them might have said something more, it passed without either reaching for it.
The candles burned lower. An elf appeared and vanished, removing a dish. Narcissa set down her fork and placed her hands in her lap, one resting on the curve of her stomach. Lucius folded his napkin along its creases — the same creases, always — and reached for his wine.
And beneath these two silences, there was a third.
It was the silence of the chair that was not yet at this table. The nursery in the east wing, half-finished, was waiting. The name in the family ledger, written in ink that would not fade, was for someone who had not yet drawn breath. Narcissa's hand moved — the smallest motion, a thumb drawn across the curve of what she carried. Lucius did not see it, or if he did, he gave no sign.
The candles flickered. The portraits were watching. Vast and patient, the silence lingered.
Malfoy Manor — June 5, 1977
The first thing was light. Too much of it, and too close, and he could not close his eyes against it because he did not yet have control of his eyes. A white ceiling, high with decorations, candlelight reflecting off pale plaster. He could see it clearly. He simply could not look away.
Then cold. The air hit his skin, and every nerve fired at once, a full-surface shock that pulled a sound out of him before he knew he was making it. He was crying. The sound was thin and ragged and not his, not the sound his voice was supposed to make. He knew with a certainty he could not explain, because he could not remember what his voice was supposed to sound like.
Hands lifted him. Firm, professional hands in gloves that smelled of something sharp and herbal. A woman in pale blue robes held him against her forearm with the practised ease of someone who had done this many times. She was speaking, but not to him.
"Healthy. Good weight. Breathing is strong."
He understood every word. He understood the clinical tone, the implication that she was reporting to someone behind her. While unable to hold up his own head, he understood all of this.
His body was wrong. Not damaged, but wrong in how a house is wrong when you have lived in a different one your whole life and walked into the bathroom at three in the morning expecting the door to be on the left. He reached for his hands and they would not come. He tried to turn his head, and it lolled against the woman's arm. Everything he knew how to do with a body, this body could not do.
He had been older. He felt sure about that. He had been older. An adult—how old, he couldn't tell anymore, only that there had been work, responsibility, something that came after. That was all. He reached for his name and found nothing. He reached for a face, his own or anyone's, and found nothing. Everything personal had been stripped away, or it had never survived whatever brought him here. But he knew other things. He knew history and language, and how to reason.
She carried him across the room. It was large. Dark wood and heavy curtains filled it. Candles provided light instead of electricity. June sunlight streamed onto a canopied bed. He saw the robes and the candles. Nothing in the room felt modern.
The woman on the bed was pale and drawn and looking straight at him. Her face was focused and intent, exhaustion held back by something fiercer.
He knew her.
The recognition hit him like a wall. Blonde hair darkened with sweat, pulled back from sharp features. Grey eyes. A face that was younger than he had pictured, mid-twenties, and more beautiful in the specific, severe way that no description had ever captured. But he had seen this face before — in his mind, in a story, in a life he could no longer remember living. He knew, with the sudden certainty of a man who has just been told something he cannot unhear, exactly where he was and exactly whose arms he was about to be placed in.
Narcissa Malfoy.
The name unlocked everything else. If she were Narcissa, then this was Malfoy Manor. The woman in pale blue robes was a healer. The Harry Potter series was not fiction. It was real, and he had been born into it.
It was an unthinkable notion. The entire scenario was inconceivable. The room, the woman, and the unexpected turn of events were all unbelievable. A story he had once known as fiction had become his present reality. He had questions. So many questions. They piled into each other. They collapsed under their own weight.
The healer placed him in her arms. Her hands differed from the Healer's, not firmer but more deliberate, adjusting him against her chest with a care that had nothing clinical in it. He could feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her gown, and something happened in his chest that he had not expected and could not control.
He was not deciding to feel this. It was his body responding to being held by its mother, and his mind, his adult, comprehending mind, could not override it. The crying stopped. The tension in his limbs softened. He felt safe, and he did not trust it. But the feeling was there in his body whether he wanted it or not.
She studied him the way he imagined she studied everything: completely, before deciding what to show. His eyes found hers and held. Not the unfocused drift of a newborn — something steadier. Something that lasted a beat too long. Her brow creased, barely, the faintest contraction of thought. Then her brow smoothed, and she folded away whatever she had noticed or imagined she had noticed into the same place she kept everything she was not yet ready to examine. Then she looked up, past him, toward the door.
He could not turn to see, but he heard the footsteps. Measured, precise, hard-soled shoes on stone. A figure moved into the edge of his vision and he caught enough: pale hair, dark robes, a rigid upright posture that looked like it had never once relaxed. Lucius Malfoy stood at the foot of the bed and looked at his son with restrained approval.
"He's strong," Narcissa said. Low and steady and certain.
Lucius said nothing for a moment. He stepped closer — not to Narcissa but to the child, his gaze moving over the small face with the careful, evaluating attention he gave to anything that bore his name. His hand lifted, hesitated, and then one finger touched the boy's fist. The fingers were impossibly small, and they curled reflexively around nothing. Lucius watched this happen with an expression that was not quite tenderness.
"A Malfoy," he said. Quietly, and to no one in particular. Then he straightened and pressed his lips to Narcissa's forehead — briefly, correctly, the way a man does when the gesture is expected and he has not yet decided whether he also means it.
"Good," he said. And turned to the healer to ask something about the next few hours.
Narcissa did not watch him go. She had already looked back down.
He did not know his name. He did not know his face. He did not know if he had been kind or cruel, loved or alone. Everything that had made him a specific person was gone, and in its place was a body the size of a loaf of bread and a children's book series that had turned out to be nonfiction.
Narcissa's thumb moved across his forehead. A small motion, almost absent, instinct rather than decision.
"Draco," she said.
He had known the name was coming. He had known it since he recognised her face. But knowing did not prepare him for the sound of it in her voice, quiet and certain and meant entirely for him.
He could not respond. He could not nod or speak or do anything except lie in her arms.
He was warm and held, and he had a name. Everything else — and there was a lot of everything else — would have to wait. He knew what was coming. All of it. He knew the names and the years, and the order in which the worst things would happen. He knew that the war these people believed was over had only paused. Voldemort was not dead — bodiless, diminished, waiting somewhere without form or urgency, because he had nothing but time. Voldemort would return. He would stand in this house. He would ask the man who had just kissed his wife's forehead and called his son 'good' to kneel, and Lucius Malfoy would not know how to refuse.
Narcissa's thumb yet again traced another path over his forehead. Her warmth was authentic. What he understood as his name, given to him by her, was now his true name or the only one he had left. He wondered what he should do now, if anything could be done. There was no one for him to ask.