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mickume
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alt_potterverse

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"You don't want a child," she reminded him dully.
"I don't want you to have his, either," he snapped.
She said nothing.
"Does this mean you've changed your mind?" he asked sharply. "Is that what you came to tell me? That after everything, you still—"
He broke off, furious and pained, and she rose to her feet, taking his face delicately between her fingers.
"Tom," she said. "Nothing has changed."
He swallowed moodily, blue eyes flashing with displeasure.
"I'm as much yours as I've ever been," she promised, but he stood still for a moment, stubbornly making her wait before gradually sliding his hands up her shoulders, raising her up for his kiss.
"And Lucius?" he asked, his expression going cold.
"When I close my eyes," she said, "he almost looks like you."
Tom grimaced. "Aren't you tired of pretending, Narcissa?" he asked her. "Haven't you fought it long enough?"
"Almost," she promised him. "Almost."
"What about Abraxas, for my father," Lucius suggested, and Narcissa turned from her spot by the window, missing the sea breeze from Tom's castle. There, the walls themselves seemed to warm at her touch, humming indolently under her palms, and from there, the view, wherever she stood, was imminently breathtaking.
Here, though, everything was dull.
"No," she said. "I told you. A constellation, for my family."
Lucius hesitated before rising to his feet, approaching her tentatively.
"Cygnus?" he asked. "For your father?"
She shook her head, staring out the window at the clouded sky above.
"Not a swan," she said. "Something powerful. Unbreakable." She leaned her head back, watching a patch of clear sky come into view. "Something that can't be burned," she whispered, more to herself than to him, and Lucius stepped closer, resting a hand on her shoulder.
"Draco?" he suggested; warily, as if he thought she might argue. For once, though, she felt grateful that he'd understood.
She rested her hand on her stomach, wishing to exist in two moments at once.
"Draco," she whispered, feeling the baby kick.
He was beautiful.
If this was love, she thought, then it was an indulgent one; a sweet one, a gentle, honeyed one, a lullaby on a summer breeze that was hummed amid the flowers, beneath the stars, and if this was love, then it was fragile and delicate and tiny, like the perfect fingers on the hands of her perfect son. It was soft and wa...
He looked precisely like his father, grey eyes and pale blond hair.
He looked unmistakably like his father.
She'd never seen Tom's blue eyes go so cold.
It wasn't just sex.
Sometimes it was fighting, though at times, those things were indistinguishable too.
At times, like tonight, there was anger to the way he fucked her, and though it was good—yes, Tom, so good, always so good, you fucking bastard, you're always so good—it was mean and rough and furious, and eventually he was left to stare at the line of her back as she picked her dress up from the floor, carefully mendi...
"I don't want you to leave," he informed her flatly.
"I don't want to either," she reminded him, glancing over her shoulder, "but I have to, Tom. You've made it clear that you don't like it when I bring Draco here, and—"
"Don't," he snapped, flinching. "Don't talk about him."
She turned, perching beside him on the bed, and slipped a finger under his chin.
"Do you still want me, Tom?" she asked him. He leaned into her hand, pressing a kiss to the inside of her wrist, and she sighed, letting him pull her into his chest. "Then be patient," she whispered to him. "Be patient."
He gripped her hand, the splintered lines on his palm closing around her fingers.
"You promised me forever," he reminded her, and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking a breath.
"I know," she told him. "I know."
"Lucius?" she asked, opening her eyes to find him standing in the window frame, staring out at nothing. "I didn't know you were back. Is something wrong?"
He turned stiffly towards her, revealing a deep purple bruise across his face and slim tracings of marks that ran down the side of his neck, reaching like tendrils into the fabric of his shirt.
"Lucius," she gasped, unsteadily lurching to her feet, and he stared through her, haunted.
"You'll take care of our son, won't you?" he asked hoarsely. "If anything happens to me, you'll protect him?"
"Lucius, why—"
"Promise," he rasped. "I need you to promise."
"Yes, Lucius, of course, I'd never let anything happen to Draco, you know that—"
"I think he wants me dead," he said, half-babbling to himself. "I used to think he favored me, but now I think he hates me. I thought it was fatherhood alone, but he doesn't seem to bear any ill will towards Nott. He treats Crabbe and Goyle no differently. But me—" he broke off, choking quietly, and Narcissa, lacking a...
"He hates me, Narcissa, and I think he wants to kill me," Lucius whispered to her. "Sometimes I think he's killing me slowly just so he can watch."
"No," she said helplessly, though she wondered if it were true; she traced the lines along his neck, soothing the welts that led to his chest. "No, he—I'm sure that's not—"
"Take care of our son," Lucius said painfully. "I would die for him, Narcissa. Just promise me he'll be safe."
"You're not dying," Narcissa admonished, but felt a pang of guilt; she knew she could make no such promise. Not yet. "But you'll never have to worry, Lucius. I will always protect our son. I promise you that."
He closed his eyes, heaving a deep sigh.
"Thank you," he murmured.
She closed her eyes, too.
But this time, in her arms, she only felt his sorrow.
"It's easy," Tom ranted, throwing a cauldron against the wall. "Brew him a poison. Cast a fucking spell. Throw together some hair and bone and venom into a fucking cauldron and just fucking wish it," he snarled. "Just do whatever it fucking takes, Narcissa, to keep your fucking promise—"
"Breathe," she snapped, and like the castle itself were suspended, he froze.
"You will not lose your temper like this," she warned him. "Not if you intend to keep me."
His mouth stiffened.
"You were supposed to always be mine," he said.
"You were supposed to always deserve me," she returned.
He curled one hand into a fist, pressing his lips to a thin, inarguable line.
"The decision to be rid of him is yours," he conceded. "I'll keep him alive. If," he added sourly, "that's really what you want."
"You have always asked me for everything, Tom," she reminded him. "I would hope that the autonomy of my own husband's murder might fall under the category of things I can safely request from you."
"You said you didn't love him," he accused.
"I don't," she replied. "But he's the father of my son, Tom, much as it pains you to hear it."
"It doesn't pain me," he spat. "It incites me. It floods me with fury, with rage, and I can hardly eat, hardly sleep, hardly think for knowing what he is to you—"
"He will never be what you are to me," she said, stepping towards him. "Tom. No man will ever be what you are to me, I swear it."
He bent his head.
"I can't sleep," he mumbled. "I can't sleep. I can't sleep. I can't sleep."
Narcissa reached up, smoothing the hair from his forehead, and saw the lines under his eyes.
"Be patient," she whispered, pressing her lips to the furrowed span of his brow.
It was impossible not to mark her son's growth with her lover's decline.
"Here," Tom said, thrusting something into her hands the same day Draco had first learned to smile at her, his little fingers playing with the light from her features. "I need to—to arrange things. To hide things. I want you to keep this," he instructed, eyes wild. "A diary. A horcrux. Another secret, Narcissa, if you'...
"Tom," she said slowly, glancing down at it. "Is everything—"
"Alright?" he guessed, blinking. "No, no, it isn't. Your swine of a husband cost me the goblins, the wolves are fucking lawless, the Ministry is breathing down my neck and you, Narcissa," he barked, laughing humorlessly, "you exist to torment me. To dangle out of even my indomitable reach. Someday your son will be grow...
He stepped towards her, an eerie smile on his face as he watched her go rigid with fury.
"Do you think your son will kneel so reverently at my feet, Narcissa?" he asked darkly, and she slapped him so hard it stung them both, her palm buzzing with pain as his face glowed red from the pressure of it.
"Leave my son alone," she croaked, and he gave her a brilliant sneer, taking a step to press her back against the wall.
"I don't want your son," he snarled, the words slipping through desperately gritted teeth. "I want you, Narcissa, and however long it takes, I'll wait. You told me to be patient," he reminded her. "I have more lives than you can possibly imagine to do so."
She closed her eyes, suffering a chill.
Breathe, she thought, and inhaled.
"Is that a threat?" she finally asked, her eyes fluttering open, and the look on his face confirmed it.
"All things are sacrifice," he whispered to her. "What's a little more time, Narcissa, when I already possess it all?"
He kissed her then, laughing, and tasted of madness and delirium, a venom that burned at the roof of her mouth.
"You promised me eternity," he said between her lips, letting the consequence of a deal she'd made with a very different version of him stick to her teeth and twist her tongue to silence. "You promised me."
You're not the man I loved, she couldn't say, because she wasn't wholly sure it was true.
He crackled with power.
She sought out a plan.
He'd always made magic seem so easy. She'd loved him first for that—for what he could do with it, as no other witch or wizard had ever done. As if it were a thing to call upon at will, an element in the air, a being that danced along the currents. He used it equally for beauty and pain and she'd loved him for it, admir...
She collected things slowly, one by one.
She started with him.
His blood, firstly, which was easy to find, and easy to take. The castle let her in and helped her slip out, welcoming her and then sighing in her escape, lamenting her absence like a child denied its favorite toy.
The bone was more challenging. At first she thought to find his father's bones, but remembered that his own bones existed; this, too, the castle made easy to find, leading her to an unmarked grave where Tom had buried his own body, the grotesquely splintered dagger still left where she'd once dug it into his side. She ...
She added a hair, too, plucking it from his pillow. It was still raven-black, as thick as a silken thread, and she rested it atop the bone and beside the blood, pondering what to do next.
She knew that sacrifice was important; he had sacrificed his secrets time and again, and he'd made it clear that magic was some sort of give and take, so while she had taken from him, she gave of herself. She added the flower of her namesake, winding her own silvery blonde hair around the stem. She added a rose, too, f...
A request of this magnitude, she knew, would require the thing she loved most in the world, and so when Draco stumbled, cutting his knee with a wail, she slid a drop of blood from him, too.
She knew it wouldn't be immediate; Tom had often said that time and place were as necessary to magic as any of the ingredients, and it was from an iteration of him in her past that she gleaned the perfect—the only—opportunity.
Samhain, he'd once said, then-drawing her out into the crisp autumn air. The doorways to the Otherworlds open for sacrifice, for offerings to the dead and the living, on the night we call Halloween.
Sacrifice, she thought, recalling his constant refrain.
She waited to make hers.