Requiem

Requiem

Stay Together For the Kids

Narcissa, ironically, had been given a name that did not suit her at all. Oh, she was aware of her own beauty; she could hardly have forgotten it, when it was all anyone ever saw of her. And, to be fair, she would not have gotten as far as she had, had she been born plain. She was not vain, or conceited; she knew that her looks were merely a matter of chance--chance and genetics--and she would rather have been known for her brilliant mind than her pretty face. There were days when she wished she had been born short and chubby and cross-eyed and prone to spots.

Beauty had shaped Narcissa's life from the beginning. She had been the result of a love-match; her parents were purebred and well-born and shabby poor. It was her greatest shame--that she had born to a pair of kind, thoughtless idiots. Her mother had been a great beauty, and expected to do better; her soldier father as handsome as he was worthless. Narcissa had somehow inherited double their brains, and double their looks, and it was not until she was of an age to enter Hogwarts that she grew to hate her parents.

It was one thing to be poor. All the respectable wizarding families were poor then: the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Goyles; none of them had any cash to speak of. Whenever they came up short they sold some silver, a jewel or two, a few hundred acres of land. Narcissa's parents had nothing to sell. When it was time for her to go to Hogwarts there was no money at all. For ten years, until she was well-married and wealthy and established, Narcissa had nightmares about what happened next.

Her father took her to Hogwarts, to the Headmaster, an old man named Dippet with bad breath and shaking, spotted hands and dirty fingernails. He left her in the office, telling her to show Dippet how smart she was. The old man did not touch her, not then; he dared not with her father in the anteroom. He only leered at her from a safe distance, and told her how pretty she was. Narcissa was just young enough to be flattered despite her fear; she smiled and simpered and tossed her hair and generally made a cake of herself.

Dippet rewarded her posturing with a full scholarship, and he did not even ask her to take the test she had expected and studied for. She came to Hogwarts on the train that autumn, wearing the patched robes her mother had cut down for her, pulling her battered trunk full of Spello-taped books and clutching her new wand. She was so proud of herself, then; she did not realize there was anything different about her. She had kissed her handsome father and beautiful mother goodbye on the platform, and seen the stares and heard the whispers, and she did not understand what was wrong.

On the train no one would sit near her and she did not understand why, but she had always been alone and so she was not bothered by it. In the end she found an empty compartment and sat idly flipping through her textbooks, wondering what school would be like. Someone came around with a cart, selling drinks and candy but although she was hungry she knew better than to waste her money on something that wouldn't last. After several hours, when she had read nearly all of her Transfigurations book and made notes in its margins of several applications not mentioned, a small black-haired boy flung open the door and threw himself on the seat across from her. The two of them rode the rest of the way in silence, the boy sulking and Narcissa eying him from behind her book.

She was sorted into Slytherin house, which puzzled her a bit; her mother had been a Hufflepuff and her father a Gryffindor and they had told her she'd likely be a Ravenclaw. But she was an obedient child, then; she did what she was supposed to do. She always had. When Dippet summoned her to his office, she went: she went, and she sat in his lap, and she smiled when he told her how pretty she was, and gave her some money to buy herself something small. She knew, of course, that what he wanted from her was wrong, but she had not been raised to contradict adults. She knew what he wanted and she did her best to please him.

In the halls the other children sometimes whispered about her cousin Tom, but to Narcissa Tom Riddle was an awkward man she barely knew, a man her father despised. She did not listen. She did not connect Riddle with the other names whispered at Hogwarts, with Voldemort, or Lucius Malfoy. Lucius was another cousin, the head of her family; she had been a bit in love with him forever.

By and large Narcissa was happy at Hogwarts, and if she gave up a part of herself to stay there, well, everyone makes certain sacrifices. She graduated at the top of her class and received a dozen offers from top research firms and think tanks. She also received an offer of marriage from Lucius, and it seemed to her like a dream come true. They were married three years later, when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-one; very early on she knew it was a mistake. Lucius wanted nothing from her he could not have gotten--had not gotten--from other women.

Night after night she lay in the big bed in Malfoy House, the bed in which a dozen Malfoy heirs had been conceived and several born and several died. Night after night Lucius lay beside her, a cold pale indifferent shadow on the black satin sheets. Dippet had made her want to scream, but when she was with Lucius she recited chemical formulas to keep from falling asleep. Within six months she was pregnant, and she wondered if Lucius had done something to insure conception.

There was something about carrying this child--this boy that was her husband's longed for son--that made her want to die. She slept on her side, because it was the only comfortable position; she could remember being thirteen and seeing Lucius and Tom Riddle, fifteen and seventeen years her senior, standing close together but not touching, the night of Orion Malfoy's funeral. At the time she had thought they were not touching because Lucius hated Tom; this was strange innocence for a girl who had had none to speak of.

Seven months in she stood at the top of the stairs and held her breath and let herself fall but Lucius caught her and the baby inside grew healthy and strong and after that she was never alone. When Draco was born she hated him on sight; he was perfect, beautiful, no mark on him of his parents' sins. She had heard that Lucius had a bastard son born with the Dark Mark blazoned across his face but she was afraid the darkness in her son went far deeper though it did not show at all.

It was easy to punish Draco, maybe too easy, and sometimes she found herself punishing him before he had had a chance to do anything wrong. She slapped him, pulled his hair, shut his fingers in the door. Draco was only a baby but he knew better than to cry. When he was four Lucius came home unexpectedly and found she'd locked him in the closet in the dark, because he'd not learned his letters quickly enough. She tried to explain that it was for his own good, that surely it was better he learn now, from his mother who loved him. That was when Lucius hit her for the first time, and she missed three weeks of work because she dared not go out until the lump on her jaw disappeared and the bruises faded. After that Draco had his lessons with his father or more often not all and she saw him only at mealtimes.

When Draco was nine she had a brief affair with one of the men who worked in her department at the ministry, and Lucius found her out and half killed her. What was sauce for the goose was not, apparently, sauce for the gander. Draco came into their bedroom unexpectedly and said something to his father, something she could not quite hear, and after that Lucius left her strictly alone. There would be no more Malfoy heirs in his generation, but pureblood marriages rarely produced many children anyway.

When he was thirteen Draco caught his father with Tom Riddle, and after that he came to her asking to be taught the Animagus transfiguration. He never mentioned the lesson that ended with her holding his hand over a candle flame and sometimes she wondered if he'd forgotten what a terrible mother she'd been. Her Animagus form was a black bat and his was a peregrine falcon; she was disappointed to see that the experiments she'd done while he was in her womb had apparently come to nothing. Still, Draco was more intelligent than she remembered, with a quicksilver mind not unlike her own and a tendency to ask unanswerable questions she blamed on his father.

When Draco was twenty-nine she lost him forever; he came up to her where she sat, James in her lap and Sirius at her back, and she could not manage even one word for him. Sometimes she wondered what kind of woman she was, even as she made dinner for her husband and built towers of blocks with Jamie. But Narcissa was a scientist as well as a mother, and she knew that very often the first experiment--the beta test--failed, and that it was not necessarily significant.