babydraco

I'm going through old stuff, trying to see what to keep and transfer to Ao3 and what to pretend never happened. “Hands Clean” is a bit of a problem. It appears that this is one of my most popular stories, with 133 reviews, which was a “career high” for me and almost all are positive. However, the story has a few flaws in structure and use of language that I'm not happy with, which could easily be fixed but it also got Jossed in a way that makes it just not work for me anymore.

In the story, I played with traditional expectations by making Narcissa an abusive monster and Lucius the loving parent who is helpless to stop the things he's pretty sure are going on. He has so much learned helplessness he doesn't lift a finger when Voldemort demands his son.

It also has a place in memory as a story that is very superficially similar to one of my favorite HP fics of all time, "The Sacrifice of Hiding in the Light", which was written and posted at the same time as mine in a truly bizarre coincidence (we didn't hang out and therefore never compared notes). A lot of our plots diverged in important places but it's still an interesting phenomenon.

The Narcissa thing was a great idea except I can't picture either parent being deliberately abusive now. One of the big points about the canon relationship between Draco and his parents was the whole idea that just because three people are not nice to others, does not mean they lack love and loyalty to each other. When I wrote the story, we knew very little about Draco's mother. Now we know a lot about her- that she's Tonk's aunt, that she has a sister who is far worse than her, that she was willing to lie to Voldemort to save her own son, etc. Movie!Lucius is overbearing and hard on Draco but I actually doubt now that he'd ever be worse than that in the sense of getting violent. I mean, the "Lucius is totally molesting Draco" plot is a frigging classic now but it doesn't come off right in the way that so many fic writers portrayed such a situation. Because fic writers always take things too far over the top. Like I kinda did. It's much more convincing portrayed the way Felicity and Admiral Worthington were in AGATB.

I could replace Narcissa with Bellatrix, cut out a lot of the pointless extra stuff and make it severely AU...I'm torn between just letting things be the way they are, and making an effort to leave a non embarrassing internet fanfic library legacy.

The only part that still works, I think, is the part where Draco's parents pretty much sell him to Voldemort because they're afraid to defy their cult leader. Because that kind of is what happened. Lucius becomes emasculated after his prison term and during that time, Narcissa is left to find any desperate way she can to protect her family. The Death Eaters take over their home and use Draco's desire to win back respect for himself and his family to force him to kill Dumbledore and betray his own classmates. His parents don't want this but they're powerless to do a thing about it.

Accurately predicted by many fan fic writers. In a way.