Fanfic / Wish Carefully

"There exists a Muggle phrase I heard some years ago; I have come to despise it because of the truth it displays. 'Be careful what you wish for - you may get it.' Trite sounding, yes? The warning it carries is quite profound..."

—Lucius Malfoy

Wish Carefully is a one-shot Harry Potter fanfic written by Ten Toes.

To avoid going to war after Albus Dumbledore's death, Harry Potter negotiated a deal to let Voldemort and the Death Eaters gain control of Wizarding England, exiling anyone who is not a pure-blooded supremacist, and coming to collect everyone who isn't born as such once a year. Also, the Dark can't interfere with the Muggle world or risk losing their magic. While the Dark gleefully agreed to the idea at first, they hadn't counted on the long-term consequences.

Decades later, Lucius Malfoy is reminiscing on how much of a genius Harry Potter actually was. The fic is framed as the final days of Voldemort's reign come to an end, from all of the things that ended up causing his downfall.

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This fanfiction provides examples of:

# to G

• Absurdly Youthful Mother: The youngest of the girls kidnapped to serve as a Breeding Slave for the Dark pureblooded families was only thirteen when she was taken from her home and family.
• All for Nothing: The Death Eaters kidnapped eight young witches from different areas around the world to inject some fresh new blood into their limited gene pool, a solution that ultimately amounted to putting a bandaid on a broken leg. Lucius admits that at most, the girls only gave them a few more generations to hold off the inevitable decline, especially after the rest of the magical world made sure that they wouldn't be able to repeat the incident.
• Alone with the Psycho: A country-wide example. With the Muggle-borns, Squibs, and Light Supporters gone and the Death Eaters magically bound from interacting with Muggles in any capacity (lest they lose their powers), the only people left for Voldemort to turn his sadistic whims on are his own followers.
• Ambiguous Situation: Lucius wonders if the Net was put up around Wizarding Britain in reaction to the kidnappings or, since it was created so quickly, if the ICW had planned on placing the Net all along.
• Arranged Marriage: Marriages are arranged according to the wealth and fertility of the family in question. Many descendants of the Cabal face this as part of the desperate efforts to keep magic in their bloodlines.
• Artistic License – Economics: Averted. When all the Light supporters packed up and got out of the Death Eater-controlled Magical Britain, most businesses saw their consumer bases and their producers go with them, cutting out a substantial portion of the workforce in the process. Most of the remaining Dark-supporting purebloods deluded themselves that the economy would sort itself out into something smaller and more efficient. By the time Lucius is an elderly man, they still haven't recovered and lost most of the "unimportant" trade secrets and knowledge with the exodus.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: Two specific points, on a countrywide scale: A) that Salazar Slytherin's family bloodline, the Gaunts, kept "pure" due to years of inbreeding, only flourished in Voldemort because of his Muggle father's fresh blood; B) what happens if the crafty, ambitious and/or insane pure-blooded are the only ones left in an organization that they don't actually know how to run correctly.
• Asshole Victim: The Death Eaters live in a society that is slowly dying out, and are subject to the sadistic whims of the Dark Lord. Then again, they are being taken at their word, so...
• Ax-Crazy: Only when Voldemort came to rule all of Wizarding Britain, did the Death Eaters realize how unhinged he had become. His hobby of using the Cruciatus Curse on random people was only the beginning.
• Babies Ever After: While the Death Eaters struggled to maintain, much less grow their population thanks to all the inbreeding, Harry and his allies apparently all had large broods of magically strong children in their island sanctuary far away from Voldemort-controlled Magical Britain. No information is provided as to who paired up with who, just that among the families prospering include the Potters, Weasleys, Longbottoms, Bones, and Lupins.
• Baby Factory: Eight magically powerful girls and women from ages 13 to 25 were kidnapped to be bred among the higher ranks of the Death Eaters. The girls are continuously impregnated every two years until the end of their fertile years.
• Bad Boss: Voldemort is even worse now than he ever was during his first rule, since there are no Muggle-borns, Muggles, or Light-aligned wizards around to torture, and the Death Eaters are magically prevented from even touching the Muggles. This means that the only people Voldemort can enact his sadistic whims on are his followers.
• Bad Future: For the Death Eaters. The economy is in shambles, their population is dying out, the international community locked them in their own country so they don't spread, and they live under the rule of a mad dictator. For the Light side, this is inverted, as their lives improved after they were exiled — they have a prosperous economy, a healthy population, a good government, and are ultimately seen in the right.
• Batman Gambit: The premise is Harry setting up one for the Death Eaters with the Rites of Parlay. Leonidas predicts he's set up another one targeted at Voldemort specifically — with the Wizarding population in Britain dwindling to nothing due to inbreeding, Voldemort will inevitably try terrorizing Muggles for fun without realizing it (since he refuses to believe anything's wrong in his empire) and thus lose his magic. This will leave him easy pickings for the authorities and possibly cut him off from his Horcruxes as a bonus, or just kill him since his body was made by magic.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The whole point of the story. It's name-dropped by Lucius at the beginning, who hates every truth of the saying and calls it trite. The Death Eaters wished to have a world where they were in charge and that they would never have to deal with Muggle-borns, blood traitors, Squibs or Muggles ever again. They got what they wanted. It's just that they'd all been so eager to get rid of the Light supporters that the Death Eaters didn't think about the logical conclusions to what they wanted until it was too late to back out of the deal.
• Being Evil Sucks: It most certainly does suck to be a Death Eater, especially now that all the Muggle-borns are gone and there is no one left to lord over.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Harry's smug smile as he left England makes it very clear to Lucius in hindsight that Harry was fully aware of the slow, hellish Fate Worse than Death he was leaving the Death Eaters in and was, on some level, darkly amused at the idea of the Death Eaters slowly strangling themselves with their own twisted ideology. This earns him Lucius' grudging Villain Respect.
• Big Good: Harry became this after Dumbledore's death. He was the one who negotiated a deal with the Death Eaters that allowed for him and his allies to build a new flourishing magical community in the Pacific, all the while leaving the Death Eaters to slowly strangle themselves with their own twisted ideology.
• Break the Haughty: It happens on a society-wide scale, with the Death Eaters forced to see just how unsustainable and wrong their ideology was, all the while all the other purebloods around the world saw what a load of bull pureblood supremacy was.
• Breeding Slave:
  • A conspiracy of Death Eaters from the most powerful pureblooded families carried out a plan to kidnap a bunch of magically strong young witches from random areas around the world and successfully captured eight (they would have gotten more, but the magical authorities caught on by then and placed the Net over Britain as a result). The women are forced to be continuously impregnated until they reach the end of their childbearing years and are given an interval of two years between each pregnancy they have to ensure they'll be in healthy condition. It's implied that many of the women don't get to see their children if they're adopted by the family of their pureblooded fathers unless the child wants to see them, and the girls who aren't adopted share their mothers' fate.
  • The male Death Eaters, while not slaves as such, are also forced to produce as many offspring as possible, to the point that they've been reduced to using stud books (records normally used for horse breeding) to keep track of who's had children with each other.
• Brought Down to Normal: Any Dark supporter who violates the Rites of Parlay set down for them by the Light supporters will instantly and permanently lose their magic.
• The Caligula: Voldemort uses the Dark Mark to torture random Death Eaters on a whim and is noted by Lucius to have crucioed people for wearing glasses, thinking they're mocking him with the image of Harry Potter.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Lucius's grandson, Leonidas, tells him there is nothing worth saving of Wizarding England and he wants nothing to do with his family. Leonidas especially resents how his father and grandfather treat him like a breeding stud.
• The Cassandra: The clerk in charge of the Hogwarts List noticed that Squibs don't show up on the list to get their Hogwarts Letter and that fewer names were showing up on the List overall due to the Death Eaters' population decline. He kept trying to address the problem but ended up getting crucioed for his trouble.
• Cassandra Truth: The aforementioned Hogwarts letter clerk tried to point out that their population is declining as fewer and fewer names show up in the Hogwarts letter listing. Many refused to listen to him until it was too late.
• Cerebus Retcon: In comparison to canon; turns out Crabbe and Goyle being dumber than a bag of hammers is a result of generations of inbreeding among their families. The problem only gets worse when those Dark pureblood families are the only ones left in Wizarding Britain by the Parlay Rites. By the time Lucius is an old man, the current generation of Death Eater children are so magically weak that they're incapable of completing the traditional Hogwarts seventh-year courses.
• Circle of Standing Stones: The Parlay Rites were conducted at Stonehenge.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: No one in Britain is bothered anymore if someone drops to the ground screaming and clutching their arm — the Dark Lord finds it funny to torture random people through their Dark Marks. The outside world was horrified, however, and as a result, Wizarding England could not get any immigrants to possibly fill out any gaps in the workforce or add to their population numbers.
• The Conspiracy: The Death Eaters have been making very sure that Voldemort never finds out about their population decline and their attempts to avert it. They also conspire to attack Voldemort in an attempt to kill him or send him to Harry Potter for him to kill.
• Control Freak: Lucius states that the expression does not even begin to describe Voldemort, who introduced a number of draconian laws to control every aspect of people's lives, such as making it mandatory to take the Dark Mark when one comes of age.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Lucius wonders if the two biggest problems facing Magical Britain could've been prevented from getting as bad as they have if they'd been addressed earlier. Perhaps if the rich Death Eater families opened up their vaults to make more business loans available, their economy could have been saved (or at least prevented from reaching a "point of no return" to complete shambles), and if someone listened to the clerk who spotted their incoming population problem when he first warned of it and tried to address the issue, they would not have found themselves with a population that is declining in both numbers and average magical power, nor would they have had to resort to the desperate measures they did just to stave off complete population collapse for a few more generations.
• The Coup: Lucius and several other Death Eaters are secretly planning to overthrow Voldemort, having gotten sick of his rule.
• Crapsack World: Wizarding England in a nutshell, after the exiles leave. So much of the population left that the economy is in shambles and inbreeding has become even more of a problem to the point that there are more Squibs being born due to the lack of genetic diversity. The best the Death Eaters could do for the latter was to slap on a band-aid solution that managed to stave off total population collapse for a few more generations; they could do nothing about the former.
• Darwinist Desire: The pure-blood supremacists wanted to keep their magic strong and believed keeping their blood pure was the way to do it. But as a result of Wizarding England's inbred Death Eater population thoroughly discrediting pure-blood supremacist ideology, other pure-blood families around the world have come to encourage their children to seek out a magically powerful Muggle-born as a spouse to prevent their bloodlines from becoming "too pure".
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Death Eaters' society is falling apart slowly and thoroughly, piece by piece, due to several different factors. They can see that their economy has been completely gutted and their descendants are becoming magically and intellectually weaker due to their inbreeding, but there's nothing they can do to stop it unless they want to either swallow their pride or permanently lose their magic.
• Deconstruction Fic: This fic takes the unsustainable models of pure-blood methodology and Death Eater government to their logical conclusions, showing how completely untenable they'd be if they were ever put into practice. By negotiating a peace where the Death Eaters get what they want, Harry Potter secures a victory for the Light by leaving the Dark Wizards to rot under their own hubris. It's continued to work with the Death of a Thousand Cuts method because the Death Eaters won't swallow their pride and admit they were wrong.
• Defector from Decadence: Leonidas Malfoy wants nothing to do with Lucius and Voldemort, and does what he can to help the most vulnerable people in Wizarding Britain.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Of a fantasy type. Lucius doesn't understand the concept of close familial relationships, sees his own descendants as assets rather than people, and only thinks that Muggleborns are valuable to prevent inbreeding.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: The Death Eaters only took over for the sake of power, only to realize too late they have no one to lord over and they are now under the Dark Lord's "mercy".
• Didn't Think This Through: The Death Eaters realized way too late that they didn't actually give any consideration to the consequences of their "victory" or plan out how to effectively run a country. Specifically:
  • The Death Eaters' membership was comprised mainly of the old money elites and the shady criminal underclass. Following the Light Supporters' exile, they quickly find that the middle and working classes (i.e. the business owners, producers of complex goods, and skilled laborers who helped maintain and keep the wheels of society turning smoothly) were primarily made up of either Muggleborns or the Light-aligned. As a result, the economy is gutted, much of the workforce is gone, and it's not long before the infrastructure starts breaking down due to a lack of regular maintenance, and because none of the Death Eaters have the skills or knowledge on how to fix these problems, they're forced to rely on expensive goblin artificers.
  • Branching off from the above, Lucius mentions that the more aristocratic Death Eaters had expected the Death Eaters in the lower social classes to fill out some of the gaps caused by the Light-aligned workers' exodus. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to most of them that these minions had become criminals in the first place because they didn't have any useful skills and even if they wanted to improve that, they'd need training to perform those jobs and capital to start a business, neither of which occurred to the Death Eater nobility to provide.
  • Anyone with even a basic understanding of biology could tell you that there is no such thing as a superior bloodline, and what actually keeps a society strong is a diverse and healthy gene pool. The Death Eaters, being blood supremacists, wouldn't hear of it until it was too late. As a result, the constant inbreeding has been making their descendants both intellectually and magically weaker with each passing generation.
• Dirty Old Man: Lucius, though not by choice. He's forced to take several much younger women as concubines to produce more children for the Malfoy family line despite his advanced age, hoping to bolster the bloodline before he becomes too old to "perform".
• Dying Race: The Dark purebloods are losing their magic as the result of decades' worth of continuous inbreeding, with each new generation producing more Squibs than the last. In the year before the Cabal kidnapped eight foreign young witches to inject some much-needed fresh blood into their gene pool, only four pureblood children with any magical ability at all were born in Britain, compared to the 27 Muggle-borns born at the same time period. Lucius even admits that the kidnapping scheme was little more than a temporary solution to hold off the inevitable, predicting that the girls have only given them a few more generations at most. And since the ICW put up the Net around Britain after the scheme was discovered, preventing anyone from leaving or entering, kidnapping more girls is not an option.
• Dystopia Is Hard: Wizarding England under the Death Eaters has no resources or economy, is under the rule of an unhinged tyrant, and the population is slowly dying out.
• Elephant in the Living Room: No one in the Death Eater-controlled Magical England wants to talk about how their society is on the cusp of collapse with each generation being magically and intellectually weaker than the last and they're slowly dying off, especially not to their insane leader. The one exception was a lowly clerk who got tortured for his troubles, and even he gave up after a certain point.
• Enemy Mine: It's a very good indicator of the sheer desperation Lucius and the other Death Eaters have when their plan is to actively seek the aid of Harry Potter in a desperate attempt to assassinate Voldemort and save their family bloodlines from the looming oblivion posed by their inbreeding.
• Engagement Challenge: Lucius only permitted Leonidas's Squib son to marry a daughter of a Muggle-born concubine if they produced a magically strong child. Which they did, so they married. Although this has its own consequences.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: As noted by Word of God, the only ones among his descendants that Lucius genuinely cares about and doesn't treat as pawns are Draco and Leonidas, and the fact that the latter has made his distaste about the Death Eaters' screw-ups and sees Wizarding Britain as beyond salvation clearly does genuinely sadden Lucius. invoked
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Lucius ignored the fact that his grandson often visited his blood mother because he didn't want to deprive him of a genuine maternal experience when he and his stepmother never bonded.
  • Apparently, even parents willing to sell their daughters as Mail-Order Brides balk at sending them to Death Eater-controlled England.
• Everybody Lives: It's implied that all the people on the side of Light survived and had many, many descendants.
• Everyone Is Related: The pure-bloods are so inbred that they have to use stud books (records used for horse breeding) to keep track of which wizards have had children together.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Grandparent in this case, as Lucius is proud of his grandson Leonidas, even though the latter wants nothing to do with him.
• Exact Words:
  • Dark-sided Wizards cannot get involved with the Muggle world in any way. The Death Eaters initially agreed to this out of a racist desire to preserve their cultural purity and their hatred of Muggles... until a couple of families that tried investing in the Muggle world or to open businesses there in order to bring money to the magical side of Britain ended up losing their magic. The Parlay Rite considers even a tangential connection to such attempts enough to strip magic from Dark Wizards. It's implied that Leonidas gets away with his smuggling of Squib-born children into Muggle orphanages by being a Light supporter.
  • The agreement stated that the castle of Hogwarts was to remain intact. The exiles took every valuable thing from Hogwarts, leaving the physical castle intact but completely empty of any important magical literature or artifacts; when the Death Eaters confront the ICW over this, they state that the Death Eaters are lucky that there's still furniture in Hogwarts. They even took the Heart of Hogwarts, the part that made the school magical. What the Death Eaters got was a fancy but empty building for their troubles.
• Family Theme Naming: In the original series, members of the House of Black are named after stars or constellations. Leonidas Malfoy, an Original Character descended from the Blacks through his father Draco and paternal grandmother Narcissa, is named after the Leonids, a meteor shower.
• Fantastic Racism: It's present, but as science and Nazi Germany discredited eugenics, so did Voldemort's Wizarding England single-handedly discredit pureblood ideology and blood supremacy. Lucius even mentions that he's heard reports from outside Britain about other pureblooded families encouraging their children to seek out Muggleborns for marriages and trying to make sure that their bloodlines don't become "too pure", noting that his own father Abraxias (who was an even bigger purist than him) would be spinning in his grave. In the end, Lucius is still a heartless racist and classist jerk — the closest he comes to a Heel Realization is acknowledging that his idea didn't work.
  Lucius: We believed that the magic of Muggle-borns was a mistake - as if magic would grant her gift in error... what hubris! We were happy, eager even, to agree to the removal of every Muggle-born from Britain for as long as we, or our descendants, ruled. We didn't want them and were happy to have them take care of the problem for us. The mudbloods, half-bloods, and that worst of abominations - the Squib-born; would be gone and we wouldn't have to lift a finger. They would sweep in yearly and gather them up, with their families. We eagerly agreed and signed, binding ourselves, and our descendants, to that travesty. The world now knows that Muggle-borns are magic's gift. They are created to strengthen and diversify the blood and keep magic alive and strong.
• Fantastic Slur: As the story is from the perspective of a pureblood supremacist who lives in a society of them, the word "Mudblood" is thrown around rather liberally. While its original use was to demean Muggle-born wizards, it seems to have extended to any magical person not a pureblood, as Lucius uses it to refer to some of the children of the Cabal girls, who would be either pureblood or half-blood.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Not too long after the Light Exiles left Britain, the Death Eaters found out the hard way their society was tilted to the very top and very bottom due to the massive loss of the workforce and having nobody to produce goods or do the "dirty jobs" that kept society running smoothly. For example, when the magical lifts at the Ministry of Magic stopped working, they realized the maintenance clerk, the technician, and the regular repair company were gone; all of which had quietly left during the initial exile and nobody noticed until the lifts malfunctioned. In the end, they had to hire expensive goblin artificers because none of them had the skills or knowledge on how to fix the problem.
• Fate Worse than Death: The Death Eaters are ultimately trapped in their country, unable to ever leave without being permanently de-powered, with their Ax-Crazy excuse of a leader prone to venting his murderous impulses on them, and slowly dying out from the inbreeding that's taking its toll.
• Future Loser: While the Malfoys are nominally powerful and are still quite wealthy, they are forced to resort to desperate measures to continue their line.
• Generational Magic Decline: Centuries of inbreeding are taking a toll on the Dark pure-bloods, and the Rites of Parlay preventing anyone from entering or leaving magical Britain for decades have only expedited the process. More Squibs are born every year, and even the few young wizards and witches in the current generation are so weak magically that they can no longer complete the traditional seventh-year Hogwarts courses.
• Genius Loci: They thought it was a myth but the Heart of Hogwarts also left in the Light's exodus, leaving Hogwarts a lifeless shell. Moreover, it's implied the Heart knew what was going on and chose to leave, doing some bending of its own rules to allow itself to be removed.
• Gilded Cage: The fate of the women who were kidnapped by the Cabal to serve as breeding stock for the Death Eaters. They live in luxurious mansions, have their every whim catered to, are given anything they want, and their children and grandchildren can even visit them with only minor discouragement in certain cases at worst... but they can't leave at risk of Voldemort finding out about them.
• Give Him a Normal Life:
  • The Rites of Parlay ensures that Muggle-borns and their families and Squib orphans are taken to the new Wizarding Society in the Light's islands in the Pacific so they won't be killed by Death Eaters.
  • The clerk in charge of the Hogwarts List disguised his grandson as an orphaned Squib to get him out of England.
  • Leonidas takes pure-blood Squib children to Muggle orphanages so that their own children, in turn, would be declared Muggle-borns and be taken out of England.
• Godzilla Threshold: Kidnapping the foreign girls was the Death Eaters' last resort to fix their lack of genetic variety, falling birth rates, and population decline, even if it meant mixing their blood with a Muggle-born, which at least two of the girls were. Moreover, everyone has become so desperate to fix things due to Voldemort's incompetence as a ruler leading to the ruination of Magical Britain that the Malfoys and several other high-ranking Death Eaters are coming together with a plan to either kill Voldemort themselves or at least subdue him and deliver him to Harry Potter so he can kill Voldemort for them.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Death Eaters and Voldemort wanted to rule Wizarding England, without having to deal anymore with Squibs, Muggle-borns, Muggles, and anything else they hate. They got what they wanted. During the time of the fic, the logical conclusions of all of those things are playing out right before their eyes.
• Good Is Not Dumb: After Dumbledore dies, Harry surrenders right away to be spared a war. It was thought that he was cowardly at the time, especially among the Dark supporters. But really, Harry brokered the best deal possible and left the Death Eaters to die by digging their own graves while simultaneously teaching the rest of the magical world what a load of bunk pure-blood supremacy was.
• Good Is Not Soft: Lucius believes that Dumbledore would've been horrified by the deal that Harry Potter struck with the Death Eaters, as it's left dozens of people and families to a slow death.
• Guile Hero: Harry is called "almost Slytherin-like" in planning since he spares his people war with a treaty that crippled his enemies in both the short and long term, and earns the adoration of the Light by buying several islands in the Pacific to inhabit after their Exodus.

H to Z

• Harbinger of Impending Doom: Crabbe and Goyle were the first signs of the Generational Magic Decline that became prevalent in the Dark Magicals' offspring.
• Hated by All: By the time Lucius is an old man on his last legs, everyone has come to hate Voldemort so much that the Malfoys and other Death Eaters are gathering together to either kill Voldemort themselves or subdue him and deliver him to Harry Potter so that he can kill him for them.
• Heel Realization: Averted. Lucius still doesn't think what he has done is wrong, he just accepts that it didn't work, and admits that clinging to Voldemort's insane agenda will doom Britain's remaining pure-bloods. He's still a racist old man to the core that went the route of the Retired Monster rather than having a Heel Realization.
• Heir Club for Men: Pansy and Draco initially had a difficult time conceiving due to her body reacting adversely to the male selection spells. She was only able to bear a daughter which resulted in Lucius buying a concubine for Draco. Both Malfoy men took concubines to sire more children to ensure the continuance of their line. This becomes a critical layer of the population problem, because the other pureblood families were using the same spells and didn't realize that they needed daughters too.
• Heroic Bastard: Leonidas is born from the union of a pure-blood concubine and Draco. He is also heavily implied to be a Light supporter, as evidenced by his retaining his magic after spiriting Squib-borns away to Muggle orphanages.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The unnamed Hogwarts clerk saved his grandchild from growing up in the horrific tyranny of Voldemort-led Wizarding Britain by disguising said grandchild as an orphaned Squib. This means the clerk never saw said grandchild again.
• Humanoid Abomination: Voldemort, much to his supporters' chagrin, who hadn't seen him after his return, and now discovered that their precious Dark Lord was an insane, hideous abomination.
• Humiliation Conga: Nothing goes right for the Dark Magicals. They got exactly what they wanted, only to watch everything fall apart while the Light just sits back in prosperity and lets their own prejudices do them in.
• I Am Not My Father: Leonidas wants to be nothing like his father and grandfather, secretly supporting the Light and helping people get smuggled out of Britain.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Lucius reasons that getting a concubine for Draco and later kidnapping eight foreign witches to force them into reproductive slavery was necessary to continue the lines of the Malfoys and several other prominent families.
• I Want Grandkids: A dark example in that it's only for the continuation of the family line, and Lucius will ensure them in any way possible.
• I Warned You: The Hogwarts clerk who tries to tell Voldemort of the declining pure-blooded wizard birthing rate is crucioed until he stopped trying. Ultimately he's killed. At least he's able to get his grandson out of the country before he dies.
• Implausible Deniability: Lucius and the other Death Eater deny that they kidnapped those eight foreign witches despite there being a lot of evidence, although it helps that Voldemort was offended when he was asked and Crucioed the ambassadors.
• Inadequate Inheritor: One considerable source of worry for the first-generation Death Eaters is the fact that many of their youngest descendants are in no shape to carry on running their society with their magical and intellectual deficiencies.
• Industrialized Evil: The women kidnapped by the Cabal are not to be harmed so as to keep them healthy for reproductive purposes. Also, they and their partners are given fertility potions to ensure a quick conception, and the girls are given a rest period of two years between each pregnancy.
• Insistent Terminology: Death Eaters are reduced to using studbooks to keep track of who's related to who, but they don't call them that. They call them Family Genealogy books.
• Irony: Leonidas Malfoy, despite coming from a long line of Slytherins, better embodies the values of the Gryffindors by being the brave, just, and righteous White Sheep of his family.
• It Is Beyond Saving: Leonidas has this opinion of Wizarding England, after seeing how badly Voldemort's rule and the Death Eaters' ideology screwed everything up.
• Know When to Fold Them: Instead of fighting the Death Eaters, Harry chose to surrender, eliminating casualties for the Light side while having the Death Eaters dig their own graves.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Death Eaters have terrorized Britain for years, committing their acts of mass murder and terrorism with nothing but pride in their pure-blood ideology. But when Harry gives them the world they want, not only has their arrogance made them woefully inept at running the now abandoned Britain, it's also ensured that they're trapped in Britain, slowly dying out from inbreeding and with an increasingly Ax-Crazy Voldemort who has made them his new playthings.
• Last of His Kind: Because of his immortality, Leonidas believes that eventually, Voldemort will be the only remaining Wizard in England, and with no wizard followers left to torture, his sadism and insanity will inevitably drive him into attacking a Muggle, at which point he will immediately lose his magic. This will either result in his body collapsing with no magic to sustain it, or the Muggle authorities will believe him to be some sort of deformed madman and have him either imprisoned or committed.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Fewer and fewer Dark families are able to have children and even fewer are able to have children with magic. Inverted with the Light exiles, who have a very healthy and robust population.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Everyone is doing their best to keep Voldemort himself from finding out about the Squib problem and the existence of the kidnapped girls because he'll have the mother of all Villainous Breakdowns if he does, which will be very painful for everyone involved.
• Long Game: Part of what makes Harry's defeat of the Death Eaters so terrifying is how slowly it's playing out, to the point that Lucius' grandchildren have grandchildren of their own. Lucius himself even curses their collective shortsightedness.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • No Dark-sided Wizards can get involved with the Muggle world in any way. Leonidas Malfoy gets around this by being a Light supporter.
  • Lucius mentions that he and the other Death Eaters tried to find one on the contract they signed with Harry and his forces, but ultimately they couldn't find any.
  • The matter of the Heart of Hogwarts. The Heart is just sentient enough to declare itself a Light supporter, which means that it has the right to leave Britain and the Death Eaters couldn't stop it from happening. The artifacts that granted its sentience were all placed by one of the school's founders, and that only required a "descendant of their line" to claim them... so all the Light Wizards had to do was find people with the founders in their family trees and just take the artifacts.
• Magically-Binding Contract: The Rites of Parlay set the terms for the Light's surrender and exile. The terms were that no Light-sided witch or wizard will step foot in Wizarding England while the Dark is in control of England except for once a year. On said once a year, the Light will come to take the Muggle-borns, half-bloods, and Squib-born to safer places. The Dark Wizards are not allowed to interfere with any muggles or Muggle-borns in any way; if they do, they'll lose their magic. The Dark Wizards happily signed this contract without thinking of the long-term consequences of their actions, resulting in a society that is slowly dying away.
• Mail-Order Bride: A sign of Wizarding England growing worse is that the population initially had to increasingly resort to obtaining foreign brides. A bigger sign was that more and more people are refusing to give said foreign brides to them. Lucius recounts how Dolohov attempted to get a young Russian pure-blood witch for himself, only for her family to back out when they heard about the state of Wizarding England.
• Make an Example of Them: Harry's deal ultimately did this to Magical Britain in order to teach the rest of the magical world that pureblood supremacy is a big load of garbage and a "purebloods only" society would effectively end up killing itself over time.
• Mandatory Motherhood: It is imperative for the remaining pure-bloods to breed, and this is especially true for the women kidnapped by the Cabal, seeing it was the reason they were kidnapped.
• Mars Needs Women: When the Death Eaters realized that the inbreeding was rendering them incapable of bearing children (and even those they did get were Squibs more often than not), they kidnapped several girls (at least two of whom were Muggle-borns) in a desperate attempt to get some fresh blood.
• Massive Numbered Siblings:
  • The Light exiles celebrated their victory and good future by starting their own families and bearing many healthy children, with rumors spreading that Harry himself had a dozen.
  • Inverted with the Dark families, the majority of whom only have a single child and heir, compounding the Royal Inbreeding problem in their society. Most of the higher-class pure-blood Death Eaters looked down on families like the Weasleys who had many children, having been taught that larger families belonged to the lower classes. In the first few years of Voldemort's reign, a pure-blood family with more than two children was very rare.
• Meaningful Name: Leonidas is descended from the Blacks through his grandmother and follows their Theme Naming of stars and constellations by being named after the Leonids, a meteor shower. In a more ironic twist, his name is Greek for "son of the lion", the emblem of Gryffindor — and he embodies the values of one by being brave, just, and righteous.
• The Migration: All the Light and their supporters moved to Indonesia and the surrounding tropical islands and reformed their society there, progressing socially and economically.
• Missing Steps Plan: Voldemort and his followers never seemed to have any sort of long-term plans beyond "get rid of wizards and witches deemed undesirable", and "take over the Wizarding world". As most of the Dark Lord's most loyal supporters are generally either on the higher or lower end of the social hierarchy, they're completely clueless about how the day-to-day operations of Wizarding England work. As such, the whole society is perpetually on the verge of collapse due to a bunch of Sheltered Aristocrat families and unskilled members of the criminal underclass that never really thought about who kept things running before, and there's nobody left who knows how to do these things now. In short, the missing step in their plan was figuring out how to actually run things should they ever get what they want.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: By the time Lucius is an old man, the Death Eaters have become so sick of Voldemort's madness and cruelty that they're planning to attack him all at once to either kill him or deliver him to Harry Potter so Harry can kill Voldemort for them.
• The Mistress: Many pure-blood men took on concubines out of desperation to ensure the continuation of their bloodlines. There's also the girls kidnapped by the Cabal.
• Moral Myopia: Lucius rationalizes kidnapping the eight foreign witches as doing what was necessary for his country and people and that the Cabal's kidnapping scheme really just "rescued" them from lives of poverty since they get to stay in luxurious mansions and be pampered like royalty in exchange for being glorified Breeding Slaves.
• Muggle Born of Mages:
  • The Squibs were treated as an embarrassment at best and an abomination at worst. To the Death Eaters' horror, as the population became more inbred from their small gene pool, each new generation has been comprised of more Squibs than the last.
  • While not quite Squibs, Lucius describes the pure-blood children of his great-great-grandson's generation as being so magically weak that they're incapable of completing the traditional Hogwarts seventh-year courses.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Thanks to the Death Eaters' own haughtiness, they condemned themselves to a slow death with the whole world watching, discrediting their entire ideology. This trope is invoked by Lucius and the Death Eaters; they will attempt to neutralize the Dark Lord to kill him or deliver him to Potter.
• No Cure for Evil: Magical healing is primarily a Light-aligned profession. After the mass Light exodus from Britain, very few healers remained. Those that did stay only remained out of a sense of duty, sending their families with the exiles.
• No Delays for the Wicked: Averted. One of the first signals the Death Eaters have of how bad things are going to become is when the Ministry lifts break down, and they find out the maintenance clerk, the technician and the company that fixed them have left.
• No Ending: The fic ends with Lucius describing his and his compatriots' plan to attack Voldemort all at once themselves in the hopes of either killing him or at least subduing him so they can deliver him to Harry to kill for them. It's left ambiguous as to whether it will succeed or not.
• Offing the Offspring: Fatal magical accidents would increase if a child was proven to be a Squib. If the child between a Cabal woman and a homeschooled Squib is magical, the Squib mysteriously dies after the child's first proof of magic.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Averted. The bulk of the Death Eaters belonged either to the criminal underclass or the aristocratic pure-blood lines. The middle and working classes, those that produced complex goods or provided skilled services that kept everything behind the scenes running smoothly, were primarily Light-affiliated. With those people gone, Wizarding society in Britain rapidly begins to feel the pinch. To illustrate, Lucius specifically mentions the example of the day that the magical lifts in the Ministry stopped working. Not only had the clerk who was supposed to oversee the maintenance left, but so had the artificer he had previously contracted. In the end, the Death Eaters had to hire expensive goblin artificers simply because none of them had the skills to fix the problem.
• Original Character: Leonidas Malfoy, Draco's son and Lucius's grandson, an undercover Light-side supporter who smuggles pure-blooded Squib children into Muggle orphanages.
• Parental Favoritism: Lucius's favorite grandchild is Leonidas, but that's because he's magically strong and a male on top of that.
• Point of Divergence: After Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry, instead of choosing to fight Voldemort and the Death Eaters, chose to invoke the Rites of Parlay in order to minimize the deaths of the Light Supporters.
• Practically Different Generations: This ends up happening for the Malfoys after the kidnappings, as Leonidas, Draco, and Lucius reproduced with the concubines, resulting in their respective children being drastically younger than their half-siblings.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The kidnapped girls are well treated to reduce the possibility of miscarriages. Lucius even notes that the world being worried about them being horrifically abused was ridiculous as that would almost certainly cause miscarriages or other birth problems which defeats the whole purpose of kidnapping them in the first place.
• Prejudice Aesop: Building a society on racial purity and the exclusion of others is not sustainable. The Death Eaters find this out the hard way when their ideology is put to the test, and it slowly erodes in front of their eyes. Meanwhile, the Light thrives without the Death Eaters getting in the way.
• Pure Is Not Good: Due to their obsession with blood purity, the Death Eaters' population is in decline and more Squibs are born in each succeeding generation. With their ideology discredited, the rest of the magical world learned this lesson.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Lucius now realizes their victory over the light is this. While they may have gotten what they wanted, they condemned themselves to an insane ruler, a shambling economy, and a slow death due to inbreeding.
  • While the Cabal managed to temporarily stave off their families' decline by kidnapping some foreign witches, the kidnappings cause the ICW to place the Net over Britain, effectively trapping all Dark wizards in the country.
• Racist Grandpa:
  • Lucius, especially now that he literally is a grandfather and great-grandfather.
  • When the Malfoys bring in a half-blood concubine to conceive a son with Leonidas, several of the talking portraits (presumably of Malfoy family members) have to be moved from their positions, as they upset her and make a huge racket over her blood status.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: What cements Lucius Malfoy as a Retired Monster is that he doesn't understand why the rest of the world made such a big deal about the foreign girls' kidnappings and believes the women should be grateful to him for "rescuing" them from their impoverished backgrounds and letting them live in luxurious mansions with their every whim pampered to in exchange for popping out a kid every two years.
• Redemption Equals Death: The unnamed Hogwarts clerk. He isn't entirely innocent, as wizards that remained in Britain were primarily Dark-sided unless they were Healers who stayed out of obligation, but he eventually realizes the pitfalls of his chosen side. When his warnings go unheeded, the clerk ensures his grandchild's escape and is killed for it.
• Released to Elsewhere: Subverted as the Rites of Parlay ensure that Muggle-borns and Squib-born are taken to elsewhere (by elsewhere, they mean the new Hogwarts in Indonesia) so they won't be killed by Death Eaters.
• Resignations Not Accepted: One cannot quit or refuse to become a Death Eater.
• Retired Monster: Lucius regrets signing the contract with Harry Potter and the Light, but only how he did the things that led up to it, not that he did them. The closest he gets to a Heel Realization is admitting that his ideology isn't working at this particular juncture, but he doesn't think he's wrong about pure-blood supremacy.
• Royal Harem: Lucius styles the women kidnapped by the Cabal in such terms, despite the women being nothing more than reproductive slaves.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: The ICW agents, many of whom are former Aurors, will not be bribed.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The modus operandi of the Light Exodus — everyone that was Light-affiliated or plain didn't like the Death Eaters left England for good.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: After the Dark wizards kidnap several women for reproductive slavery, the ICW puts a magical Net over England. They can't portkey, Floo, or apparate without getting automatically sent to an ICW warehouse for intensive questioning. Lucius personally believes that the ICW was planning to do this for a long time given the speed it was set up, but the kidnappings sped things up.
• Secret Legacy: Harry is descended from Gryffindor, Hermione from Ravenclaw, and Neville from Hufflepuff. Harry also gets recognized as the Heir of Slytherin. This allows them to take the Heart of Hogwarts.
• Selective Obliviousness: The "accidental deaths" of Squibs.
• Sex Slave: Subverted with the women kidnapped by the Cabal; they're not raped regularly, and Lucius even lampshades how ridiculous the rumors about sexual abuse and violence against the girls are, since the stress and mental trauma would assure a miscarriage or other birth problems.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Lucius notes Harry Potter hasn't appeared in public for years and could well have died of natural causes, further narrowing the desperate coup's chance of success.
• Sheathe Your Sword: Harry knew that he couldn't beat Voldemort and the Death Eaters in battle (and even if he tried, it would cost the lives of many Light supporters), so instead he tricked them into the Parlay agreement. Now the Death Eaters have to deal with a crippled and bleeding economy while inbreeding slowly strangles their magic.
• Shoot the Messenger: The clerk and the ambassadors get crucioed when they confront Voldemort on particular issues.
• Spared by the Adaptation: As there is no Battle of Hogwarts or Book Seven, people who would have died during the events such as Lupin, Tonks, Fred, and Colin are spared and go on to live long happy lives.
• Stupid Evil: Many of the Death Eaters' horrendous actions that crippled the country and set up their cause to die a slow and painful death were motivated by nothing more than racism at best and For the Evulz at worst.
• Subpar Supremacist: The Death Eaters believed their pure magical blood made them superior to the half-bloods, Muggleborns, and Muggles, being utterly ignorant of how they're actually pretty inbred, which is, in turn, weakening their magical powers as well as their intellectual capabilities. By the time Lucius is narrating everything, the Death Eaters' society has degraded to the point of being a teachable example to the rest of the magical world's purebloods of how unsustainable and self-defeating such an ideology is — Magical Britain's economy has completely collapsed due to a massive loss of skilled workers and human capital, their population is continuously in decline with each new generation turning out more Squibs than the last, and many of their descendants are so magically weak that they're close to being Squibs anyway.
• Success as Revenge: As Lucius bitterly notes, while the Death Eaters and other dark-aligned figures are suffering in the Hell that their own ideologies created, Harry Potter, as well his fellow Light-aligned friends and family, have been noted to be living it up in the new magical society they created in the Pacific Islands, with Harry being rumored to have fathered a dozen children. Voldemort was not happy when he learned about this and it only drove him further into Ax-Crazy madness.
• Super Breeding Program: The kidnapped women were a last-ditch effort for affluent pure-bloods to breed magically strong children.
• Superhuman Trafficking: A Cabal of Death Eaters, in a desperate attempt to get fresh new blood, kidnapped a number of young witches from around the world for reproductive slavery.
• Super Registration Act: It is mandatory to take the Dark Mark when one comes of age in Voldemort's society.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Nope. For all that he's been utterly humiliated and watching his society fall apart and ideology discredited, Lucius is still horrible and irredeemable.
• Tangled Family Tree:
  • Pure-bloods tend to be very closely related, and this works against the dark-aligned supremacists as the lack of genetic diversity has led to the worsening Generational Magic Decline that's leaving their descendants magically and intellectually weaker to the point they might as well be Squibs.
  • In an effort to ensure the continuation of the Malfoy family name, Draco sired five magical children with at least a couple of different concubines while Lucius sired two more children before he became too old to "perform". The latter two (whose genders are not specified) are therefore the aunts/uncles of Draco's children, despite being roughly the same age as them.
• Tempting Fate:
  • The Death Eaters were absolutely certain that they didn't need the Muggles or the Muggle-borns. How wrong they were...
  • During their kidnapping operation, the Death Eaters thought nobody would notice a few missing witches from poor families in backwater areas.
• To Win Without Fighting: What Harry and the Light exiles achieve. Without getting any of their own people killed, they leave the Dark Wizards to wither on the vine, and got them to agree to it wholesale at the same time.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Wizarding England is dying out due to inbreeding and the remaining children are getting magically weaker and more mentally deficient with each succeeding generation.
• Truth in Television: The problems facing Wizarding Britain after Voldemort takes over mirror real-life issues when constructing ethnonational states: the loss of valuable human capital, a sclerotic and backward dictatorship, international isolation, and horrible decay.
• Universally Beloved Leader: According to Lucius, Harry Potter has earned this by giving the Light supporters a new home by buying several Pacific islands for them to live in after the Exodus. This increased after the utter failure of the Dark Wizarding Britain's society and the revelations of Voldemort's tyranny came to light.
• Villainous Breakdown: Voldemort goes crazier the more he sees Potter and the Order of the Phoenix succeed. He even attacks people wearing glasses, because he thinks they're mocking him.
• Villain Protagonist: Lucius Malfoy is the narrator and main character. He remains an entirely unrepentant Death Eater who only regrets his evil actions because they backfired on him, not because they were wrong.
• Villain Respect: Lucius grudgingly admits that Harry's deal was a stroke of genius on his part.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: Lucius thinks the women kidnapped by the Cabal should be grateful to him because he "took them from poverty" and gives them whatever they want in reward for them giving birth, and he lets them see their own children.
• White Sheep: Leonidas possesses morals that Draco and Lucius simply don't. It's implied that they came from his birth mother. Tellingly, Lucius believes that he's involved with smuggling Squibs to Muggle orphanages, yet doesn't lose his magic despite involving himself with the Muggle world, something only possible if he was Light-aligned.
• Wicked Stepmother: Subverted for Pansy and Leonidas. Pansy was unable to bear Draco a son, only being able to bear him a single daughter, so Draco had Leonidas with a concubine. Pansy never resented Leonidas for this though, and in fact, Lucius notes that they never had much of a relationship with each other at all, with Pansy mostly focusing on her daughter and Leonidas frequently visiting his own mother.
• Wife Husbandry: The younger women kidnapped by the Cabal (the youngest of whom was thirteen) were groomed to get used to their reproductive slavery quicker.
• Wizards Live Longer: Lucius lives long enough to live with several regrets and to see his great-great-grandchildren.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: Voldemort successfully drives Harry and his supporters out of Great Britain, and Harry is laughing all the way to the bank. Voldemort's pure-blood society falls apart within a generation.
• Wretched Hive: Magic Britain quickly became this under Death Eater rule, not just because of their evil, but also because the Dark-aligned wizards had little skill in the day-to-day matters of running a society, being composed mostly of the absolute top or bottom of the social classes.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Lucius still believes pure-bloods are superior, but at least acknowledges that Harry Potter's deal with Voldemort was a stroke of genius on his part and that there is at least some benefit to genetic difference.

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