Failure and Fatherly Love
If there was one great failure to Lucius's life, he would name it to be his son.
Just before Draco went off to Hogwarts Lucius said to him: "The secret of the successful man, my son, is not so much ensuring he never missteps -- for this is, though I am loathe to admit it, unachievable -- but to face his error and overcome it. True failure is not in not succeeding an attempt, but rather, in refusing to face the defeat and to overcome it."
One might say that to tell a child of eleven such a thing was was to expect above and beyond what should be. Lucius however, placed in his child a great faith; one might even say that his love blinded him.
But of course, Draco would disappoint him, not only scoring embarrassingly low through the school year, but also making a fool of himself over the pathetic Boy-Who-Lived. He was not only blind his own error, he was blind to the fact that he should even think to correct it. He perhaps thought that his father would not hear of these things, or not care, but Lucius was concerned with the representation of the Malfoys in all venues, no matter how insignificant.
When his rage cooled, Lucius took Draco into the high tower where a portrait of his grandfather hung, and told him, "The successful man, my son, the true Slytherin who achieves all Slytherin ideals, is not only one who is cunning and intelligent. He is also one who faces the defeat of his own shortcomings and missteps."
But the look in his son's eyes bespoke no understanding, in the next year he was as clumsy and foolish as the first. Lucius himself, in his eagerness to correct his son's mistakes, fumbled and was forced to swallow his own sage advice to Draco.
So the next time he took Draco into his private study and counseled him, he avoided the portrait of his father, but still he heard the echo of his father's words come out of his own mouth. "So you have made a fool yourself once again? And this is unusual? Sitting there whining only amplifies your failure! Now, you truly have failed and have no rights to name yourself a Malfoy."
He had fully intended for this threat to stiffen the boy's backbone, to provoke fire and resolve through hate. But once again he failed to reach his son; in fact later in life, he suspected he had provided the grounds by which the Boy-Who-Lived gained access to the ear and heart of his son.
Lucius would say that Draco was his greatest failure because he was a mistake he failed to rectify, a moment of sentimentality in which he allowed his hand to weaken and the moment that he might have corrected his error to pass him by.
His father, that despicable and most admired man, would have rather cast Avada Kedavra than watch his son go flouncing off on the arm of Gryffindor of questionable background. Lucius found the stomach for Crucio, for curses and rebukes that made Narcissa scorn him for weeks, for even the threat of disinheritance of his only viable heir. But in the end he was weak and he failed, in the end he watched Draco his son walk away from him. In the end he wondered if Draco failed to correct himself because he did not even register that he was making a mistake.
As he walked away from his father, Draco said to Lucius: "The successful man, father, must first recognize the error of his ways before he may correct them. I'm correcting them now father -- aren't you proud?"
Such flawed thinking should have been eradicated the moment it occurred. But Lucius stayed his hand, keeping his wand in his sleeve though it burned in his fingers. He watched Draco walk away when the boy should've been stricken down; and in this he failed.
The Harry Potter world, characters, and rights belong to JK Rowlings, WB, Scholastic, and not the to me. "The Life and Times of Lucius Malfoy" is a fan work created out of love and appreciation for Rowling's characters, stories, and worlds, and is in no way intending to infringe on the rights of the author and copyright owners.