A Little Bit of Light

A Little Bit of Light

by MissMoppet

***

To have a room of one's own is a fine thing indeed

. So it has been said by those who are content with a single room. I am not content, and as this saying repeats in my mind it mocks my own discontentment with promises of a mountain-sized room where I might feel free again. But a room, no matter its size, remains a room, and the primary objective of the one who lives in it is to leave it one day, to forget it and move on to other rooms, other open spaces.

My room is beneath the drawing room. It is, for all who are not Malfoys, as good as unplottable. No revealing charm will ever give away its locale, and no tracking charm will ever betray my beating heart as I sit here, very much alive upon the chesterfield. I can hear their voices above as they search for me, inspecting the fireplaces for secret, child-sized doors (that I am not child-sized does not matter). They pull books from the shelves, one by one, hoping a wall will spring out of view, revealing a dark corridor that will lead them to their prize. Narcissa's light step imprints their own, but she will not chase them away with money or bribery. No, we must endure their suspicions for the time being. I must endure them. Surely they are beginning to think me dead. They come less often than they did before, once a week at most.

My room has one window, narrow and high. It does not look out on any pastoral scene, it only reflects, like magic, the churning temperament of the sky. A cool, misty blue of indifference. It offers a glimpse of the outside, like something of a schoolgirl tease, but no real view. My room has no view. It is a space for me and my thoughts, which have long outgrown its (admittedly) roomy expanse.

I wait for Him to call. Why has he not done so?

The room is a comfortable one, with tastefully dark furnishings, rugs that mimic a drift of crisp autumn leaves, and a massive feather bed that lurks under a mound of pillows. There are family photographs and a classical guitar (I have played since age eight). There is a pond-sized bath that has been sunken into the floor and outfitted with platinum fixtures. There are books that have taught me well, and books that have taught me more than well. I do not strike many as a man of letters, but I am more learned than any suspect.

There is a small urn on the small table in front of me. It has a glassy surface, like a pensive, and if I touch my wand to it shows all that belongs to me, and I am the surveyor of my Kingdom once more. My wife. There she is, fussing over a flower arrangement in the parlour. She chooses a daisy, then frowns at it. A little too plain for your tastes, my dear. There you go. Orchids are much more fitting. My son. He is inspecting a solution in his cauldron, toiling over a summer project that Severus has assigned him. The handful of roots he adds is carelessly measured. He is not so skilled as he believes. Severus' praise has bloated his ego.

There is a knock at the front door. Not my door, even though it is still my door, as it will always be my door.

Someone has come calling.

***

Welcome, Mister Bartholomew Burnish, esquire. Please allow my wife to take your traveling cloak. The house elf at your knee will lead you to the drawing room. My drawing room. I suggest one of the wing chairs near the windows, as the mid-summer light is so pleasant this time of day. I know, I remember. There is the tea and scones and a trio of jams. There is the inconspicuous bottle of bourbon, should the news you bear be of the unfortunate variety.

And his news is unfortunate. I can make out each of his words perfectly (or imperfectly--clipped in a way that suggests a North London upbringing).

Poor Virgil and Portia Parkinson, their bodies found in a rarely used room in the Eastern wing of their Manor, their backs bloodied by multiple stab wounds. Stabbed in the back, old Virgil? How could you be so careless? Narcissa says very little. She is remembering, perhaps (as I am), how the Parkinsons have feuded with their nearest neighbours for generations, each laying claim to the forest that separates them. Quite a lot of fuss for a few little trees, but it is said that Salazar Slytherin was born beneath their towering canopy, and that they bear his blessing to this day.

"And what of their daughter Pansy?" This from Narcissa, always getting to the heart of the matter. Little Pansy, it would seem, trip-trapped home from King's Cross on her own, as she always did, stopping for an ice-cream sundae in Diagon Alley beforehand. She Knight-bussed up to Wiltshire shortly thereafter, and found the Parkinson Manor quiet and stuffy. There were no house elves to unpack her trunks, so they remained unpacked. She spent the first week happily filling the ballroom with bluebell-colored bubbles from Droobles Best Blowing gum, then set to painting every room in the house that same bluebell colour, waiting for one of her parents to finally emerge and deliver a sound scolding. But they never came, Virgil and Portia, and she wailed and tantrumed, upsetting a breakfront filled with ivory china. It was the smell that finally drew her to the Eastern wing, that ripe, unsettling scent of good fruit gone bad. And there they were, Virgil and Portia, wizened like old apples by then, with flies singing in the spaces where their eyes had been.

When one signs on to be a Godparent, one never does so with the possibility of unfortunate events in their mind. There are only small pleasantries and well-wishes, a demure champagne toast, perhaps, paired with the silent and shared understanding that, oh, these ceremonies are just petty necessities in the grand symmetry of things, are they not?

So much for ceremony. Come tomorrow, I will be Father to a girl named Pansy.

***

My front walk

. The air is sun-dusted with mid-morning light when Burnish brings Pansy up the winding path that is flanked on either side with blood-red and yolk-yellow chrysanthemums. Narcissa extends a pale hand. The girl keeps her eyes to the gravel, and the hand has no choice but to settle clumsily on her shoulder (what is clumsy for Narcissa is elegant for everyone else). The necessary paperwork has already been taken care of. Who wants to carry out such unhappy business in front of the girl? Not that she would notice. Not that she looks anywhere else but down.

My parlour

. Draco does not know what to say to this girl, his new sister. He eyes her warily from just behind the slope of her trunks, as if she has betrayed their friendship by ending up like this, orphaned and needy. She looks up, finally, and her face has the swollen, morbidly blurry quality of one who has been crying her eyes out. Or is this a trick of the light? Her gaze scouts out the corners of the room so sharply, like a cat claiming new territory. She is something of an ugly, awkward thing, or perhaps it is grief that has left her burdened with this air of unattractiveness, this sullen and thankless expression. Draco finally speaks up, offering to help her unpack later (good boy). Her quick acknowledgement comes in the form of a nod.

Narcissa shows her to her rooms: a suite decorated in pearl gray and shell pink, calming colours that do not seem to suit this girl at all. Her mannerisms are (and have always been, to my memory) suggestive of one who either shouts and sings in vivid, bluebell-blue, or retreats into an oily, absolute black. Narcissa murmurs words of condolence and leaves the girl to her private, stifling thoughts. She is alone but for my watchful, Fatherly gaze, and I am all the more pleased that she is unaware of it.

I expect that she will fling herself into girlish nesting now, the sort of charming pomp and circumstance that females like to comfort themselves with in times of hopelessness. She might sit at the vanity and brush out that tangle of banshee hair and pinch her round cheeks until the apples come back. Or perhaps she will pile the bed high with dollies and plush unicorns, fuzzy and gimlet-eyed playmates that she can confide in when all goes dark (is she too old for such things? I have never had a daughter, I do not know). She does none of this, and instead sits down inelegantly in the middle of the floor, her skirt ballooning out like a humph of exasperation. She works her sharp little fingers into the rug with great effort and yet little concentration, her face now hopelessly bored, as Draco's sometimes gets. After several minutes of picking and poking she triumphantly yanks free a long thread and studies its end as if hoping to find a fish dangling there. Then she pulls and pulls and pulls, subtracting the rug from its original shape, the square unwinding in a lopsided way until she finally sits on nothing more than a raft, set adrift on a sea of parquet. Then she stands up and kicks the pile of un-done rug into the fire.

That was my rug, little daughter.

***

Draco comes to me before the day is out. He is distressed, my son, and forgets for a moment that his inconveniences are small to a man who must never leave the room that he lives in. He doesn't want a sister, he says. I read this to mean that he has always been happily spoilt and feels his rights and privileges shrinking out of reach now that Pansy has come here, so orphaned and needy. As he speaks I cannot help but notice how unbecoming this childish whinging looks on him, now that he is older. Once upon a time his sour expression had charmed me--he could be so delightfully pompous, in the way that children are when they try to be like adults and only succeeding in looking exactly their age, just as they do when they raid Daddy's wardrobe and model his robes, swimming in swathes of fabric that only bring attention to those chubby, laughably clumsy limbs.

There is something else to his disagreeable attitude tonight. He does not want a sister, he says, over and over again, so many times that I soon understand his true meaning. He does not want Pansy for a sister. Whatever plans he might have had in mind, they've been destroyed now. Tossed into the fire with the unraveled rug.

"Regardless of what you did or did not want, you now have a sister, and you will treat her as nothing but a sister." How curious that my words should be so firm, leaving no room for argument. Draco's eyebrow quirks in accordance.

***

I have to have a little bit of light at night. You must understand how absolutely dark it is down here. The act of sleeping is like an act of drowning when one wakes to nothing but inky black, their heart leaping out for that light that must be up there somewhere. It must be. And if it never comes back, what becomes of me then? Will I learn to navigate the small confines of this room by touch? If I can memorize each niche in the wall, if I can measure out the exact distance from the cot to the toilet, and if I can remember how many steps it takes to get from here to there, perhaps it won't be as if I am blind at all. If I forget what everything that surrounds me looks like, then it will be as if the dark has always been there. Soon, it will be like a companion. I look forward to that time when I can curl up with it. But for now, just leave me that little bit of light.

***

A lantern burns on my desk throughout the night. I have always been a thin sleeper, a man of excess energies and ideas, and the lantern is there if I should wake before the morning light comes to greet me through my high, narrow window. Sometimes I read or write. Sometimes I pluck out a tune on my guitar, Diciotto Partite per chitara Sometimes I think that I feel the call burn into my arm, but it never does.

Tonight I sit before the urn with a tumbler of scotch in one loose hand; I do not usually

imbibe, as I prefer mental clarity, but at this late an hour such dallying is forgivable. My daughter. (Odd that those words should be such a thrill to say, as I do not remember ever wishing for a daughter in the past) It has been decided that my daughter is not to know of my existence here at the Manor. She is to know only the The Daily Prophet's version of my existence, that I am an Azkaban escapee and convicted Death Eater, a fugitive on the figurative lam. My daughter.

I expect to see her sleeping. Perhaps weeping a little, very quietly, into the plump embrace of her pillow, with one hand curled at the ready, then finally scrubbing at her matted eyelashes--such a brave little thing. She is in the bathroom instead, standing in front of the mirror and outfitted in nothing more than a white tee-shirt. She has not bathed (I can see smutches of filth on the backs of her knees, even from here), but has twined her hair into a half a dozen or so braids, as if under the illusion that this would go a long way in neatening her appearance. She rises to tip-toes to appraise her handiwork, and her tee-shirt goes with her, the round backside flashing like a wink before she drops, splay-footed once more.

Oh, how my hands itch to comfort her, to give her a bath and comb those dreadful braids out of her hair. She could collapse on me for a good cry (I would allow it), and I would stroke, stroke, stroke the vulnerable wing of her sobbing shoulder blade. Under my soothing touch, it would find the strength to fly again.

***

My daughter is something of an explorer. I say "something" because her explorations reveal none of the delights that a real explorer revels in. Early in her first week she managed to mouse her way into the attic, and began rooting through trunks with the fervor of a thieving looter, plundering into wardrobes stuffed with century-old dress robes and accessories. Most treasures that come into her hands are given no more than a cursory glance. Once, she even studied a boot for no more than a split-second before tossing it over her shoulder with such disdain that it hit a rafter and let loose a shower of dust. She sneezed twice, into cupped hands, and resumed her rummaging.

The rest of the household busies itself as it did before. Narcissa has her hobbies, and to carry on as usual is always best--though she is careful to never look too put together or too content when she sets out of the Manor and away from my watchful eye. She has a husband to be worried over, after all. Draco's desire to be an only child has sent him into the village almost every day, no doubt in search of friends and amusements that will banish the memory of his sister's presence away. His potions project sits on his desk abandoned.

I am left in the house alone with my own abandoned project.

I cannot leave this room, but it does not matter. I reside in every room, and my daughter resides in me--even if she is as oblivious as one who sins casually while lounging directly beneath the wheeling eye of God.

She has worked her way into the depths of the attic, and an hour spent clawing through trunks finally unearths something that catches her fancy. It is an acrobat's costume from the dance theater in Pigalle, its skirt short, flirty and flouncy, its bodice beaded and brief.

My Great-grandfather's own casual sins included a penchant for French showgirls, talent-less little witches but for the ability to reveal their creamy thighs in time to a four-four beat. Pansy studies the little costume with interest, running her fingers over the beadwork and holding the outfit up to her chest.

I lean forward, my interest matching hers. The urn tips and wobbles when my knees pry into the table.

She drops the costume to the floor and I think her finally disenchanted--but no, she begins unbuttoning her blouse, her fingers working hurriedly and her body posed with no regard for proper angles and lighting. The blouse lowers, revealing a slice of bare back, then falls away completely. Gone is the skirt, kicked away like an afterthought, and her knickers are (no surprise) white cotton, spankingly innocent. She manoeuvres herself into the costume with a series of contortions that give away teasing glimpses of her blush-tipped breasts. There is a fetching little bulge at her lower belly when she bends over, and her knickers bunch up and snuggle the curve of her arse. The net stockings go on, one by one, and she curses as she struggles with the garters. Her face is scrunched in impressive concentration, her eyebrows so narrowed they appear as a single black line over her eyes. Never have I seen her so at attention.

I think that she will next go to the mirror and primp, perhaps to twirl a braid around her

finger before kicking up her legs in a pint-sized showgirl's dance. She meanders in an aimless circle instead, finally plucking up a pipe from a drawer and inserting it into her mouth at a jaunty angle. She scratches her armpit, then winds a woolly winter scarf around her neck. Only then does she stop before a mirror, her stance wide and one hand on her hip as she raises her wand at her own image. "Crucio" she says, her voice muffled around the pipe. Then she laughs luridly, stamping her feet in rough applause at her own antics.

***

I know now that my acrobat will eventually cartwheel her way down her and discover me. I know it, and I await the moment with relish. It comes sooner than I expect.

I am reading under my window, and as far as I know my daughter is napping in her untidy yet virginal bed. When I hear the light snick of the door swinging open, I assume it will be Narcissa. Or perhaps a house elf with an early dinner in hand. But there she stands, my dark-eyed banshee, all alive and bare-footed, her summer dress still rumpled from her mid-afternoon nap.

"Oh. It's you," she says. And the sheer nerve--it's as if she is addressing the boot that she tossed over her shoulder with such dismissal.

"Hello, Pansy," I say, shutting my book and setting it aside. She does not return the greeting, but begins to freely wander the length of my room, pausing to pluck a few strings of my guitar and scan the contents of my bookshelves.

"I'd guessed you were around here somewhere." This finally through fish-pursed lips, as if I am part of a private joke she finds intensely amusing. I see that she's painted her mouth in a garish shade of red--unevenly, like an amateur harlot. I smile placidly, patiently. This is my daughter.

When she's circled the room a second time she finally plops down on the arm of the chesterfield and gives me a studied gaze. "What happened to your hair? Your head looks weird."

My hand flies upward, then catches itself. To think, momentarily made self-conscious by a schoolgirl.

"This is the regulation Azkaban haircut," I say, my voice a degree below cool. "I am sorry if it is not to your liking."

She shrugs, and something in my chest springs painfully. She starts scratching at the dark green damask that covers the chesterfield and I give her hand a chiding swat. "Sorry," she says, her cheeks bulging out in an appalling way. I have to stop myself from pinching them, if only to test their realness.

"Tell me, Pansy, are you finding life here at the Manor comfortable? Is there anything that you lack?" There is a pleading quality to my voice that I have never heard before, here in my very own ears.

She shrugs again, in that anxious-yet-bored way of hers. She tells me it's all right, she guesses, then begins idly playing with the end of her braid, pulling at it as she pulled at that rug. I cajole, I joke, I tell her what a fine young woman she will surely be someday. All of it elicits one shrug after the other. What lonely thoughts must reside behind that phantom gesture.

I finally loop my arm around her in the semblance of a Fatherly hug. Her scent is an excess of lavender dusting powder mixed with the sour undertones of childish, haphazard hygiene. "You're pulling my hair," she complains, wiggling away. I laugh. It's a tut-tut noise. A confident, I know better than you do, my girl sort of sound. It feels like my own version of an acrobat's costume, squeezed too tight around my mannish frame.

She leaves then, chirping out a surprisingly agreeable goodbye as she goes. There are threads of me with her when she closes the door, fine white floss clutched in her hand, so much like the hair they sheered from my head. Half of me is already unraveled.

***

She visits me often after that. I cannot think why; perhaps she mistakenly thinks me as trapped here as she is. I send the House Elves out for gifts and trinkets that will amuse and appease her, that will give her cause to curl at my feet like a docile pet. Caramel apples and Droobles Best for her to sink those carnivorous teeth into. Jeweled barrettes and strings of beads to make her glittered and gaudy. My favourite image has her reclined on the chesterfield with the bare and dirty soles of her feet exposed, a tiara tipped crazily on her head as she tries to pluck out a popular tune on my guitar. She is as rough with the instrument as she is with anything else, but I do not scold her for this.

"Did you ever kill anyone?" She asks brazenly, tossing the guitar aside with a careless flourish.

I give her a hard look. "What a question for a young lady to ask."

She snorts in contempt and crosses her arms over her chest. "My parents were killed.

They killed people themselves. A young lady should be able to ask any question that she feels like asking."

"Then she should not expect an answer from one who does not feel like answering". I prop her feet in my lap, kneading them roughly to compensate for the lightness of my tone.

She wiggles her toes, seeming pleased at my contrary nature. "I know you must have," she muses. "Otherwise they wouldn't have sent you to Azkaban."

I say nothing, allowing my fingers to venture up to the knob of her ankles instead. Her knees bounce and her fingers fiddle at her hair. She is a jangled symphony of restless energy, as usual, and every movement she makes twangs at me in agony.

"Are you just going to stay in this room forever, then? How boring." She's biting on the end of her braid, looking up at the window with indifference.

I push her feet away in annoyance, launching into a lecture about questioning one's elders. My voice is a low, imposing purr, and I punctuate every word by giving a sharp yank to each one of those maddening braids. Her eyes grow shiny with something--welled up tears, perhaps--and she stands up smartly. I expect back-talk (I know by now that her mouth is anything but leashed). What I do not expect is that she will stomp down on my guitar, cracking its delicate neck in two. The strings cry out in protest, and I grab her roughly by the arm, marching the writhing and kicking viper over to the bathroom and throwing her into its echoing chamber. She bounces off the washbasin, cursing at me with the vehemence of a hellcat. I appraise her coolly before throwing the latch and locking her in, then charming it for good measure.

I sit down and collect myself. I bring out my urn and watch her, waiting for her to go weepy with submission and penance. She pounds on the door so hard that I think her knuckles to burst open and bleed, all the while screaming words and profanities that I did not even know existed. A brick of soap finds its way into her hands and she pitches it furiously at the mirror, creating a spider web of cracks. Finally, just when her shoulders seem to slump with resignation, she shrugs and turns to the pond-sized bath. The taps are turned on at full force, and all manner of cloying bubbles and salts are dumped in before she strips and dunks under, then rises to the surface to float, placid as lily pad, even while under lock and key.

Why is it I who shakes with atonement as I unlatch the door? I only hope that she has learned her lesson, and I tell her as much. My voice is thin and reedy--from the hot mist that roils out of the bath, perhaps. She tips her head and regards me, not bothering to shrink away from my gaze. Foam clings to her breasts, giving the illusion of plumpness. The swell of her lower lip is no such thing, however, and something twists in my ribs when she bites down on it.

"You can wash my hair, I guess," she finally concedes. "If you can keep yourself from pulling it like some kind of fucking animal." She splashes water in my direction, violently so. It is me who is pulled. And to think... I once thought myself the raft that would keep her from floundering.

***

Of course I have killed before. I would not call it pleasant business, but then there is pleasure to be had when one does their job well, and I always do my job well. In 1979 I performed Avada Kedavra on a fallen comrade; Aurors had used enough hexes to burn him beyond recognition, but even pain and agony could not fully disguise his pleas for mercy. I later found one of the responsible parties and performed a number of severing charms on him, then sat back to watch him slowly bleed to death from his hundred or more shallow wounds. When I found the other Auror, he suffered even worse. I have killed for less personal reasons, simply because it was commanded of me. I have tortured and tormented Muggles for sport and felt no regret. I have held my wand to the vulnerable throat of a young child, fully comfortable with the ease at which I could end his life.

I did not expect to be so similarly comfortable now, with my own vulnerable throat exposed to the hands of a girl who is no longer a young child, but is hardly an adult. A girl who hardly has the power, insight, and knowledge that I myself have. She either does not know that she lacks this power, or she does not care. And it is either in this ignorance or blitheness from which her own power springs forth, wafting over me like a dizzying intoxicant.

***

"You have the tiniest ears." My tongue probes lightly into the pink crenellations, her hair catching on my lips and clinging like candyfloss.

"That feels gross." She turns her head and pushes weakly at my midsection, an excuse for her to roam her lively fingers over the wide planes of my chest. Her hand darts carelessly into my robes and pinches down on a nipple, hard.

I vise my fingers around her wrist. "That hurts, you vile brat." I bury my nose in her hair and breathe in deeply, drowning in contentment.

Her laugh is so low and knowing. It would unsettle me if it were issued from any lips other than hers, tinted blue today from an afternoon spent blowing her bluebell-colored bubble gum. She is sitting on my lap like any good daughter would, dressed in a white blouse and a tulip-flared skirt. Her eyes devour all of my most forbidden books, widening at descriptions of dark magic that can turn a man's skin inside out, yet leave him alive and breathing, or ancient curses which involve the blood and brains of muggle babies. I educate myself while she educates herself, my hands spidering under the thin material of her blouse, delicately biting at her breasts. Her nipples are hard little coins under my fingers, and she sighs and spreads her legs apart, her back to me as she leans forward and studies a gory illustration. My hands manipulate her hips until her arse cheeks are cosying up to me in a sweet and agonising embrace. I rock us both back and forth, my trousers a tighter and tighter prison beneath the span of her girlish thighs. She turns the page and giggles.

"Oh, fine," she concedes, tossing the book aside (always tossing things aside, she is) and leaning back into me, her shoulder blades knifing into my chest. She hurriedly guides my hand under the petal folds of her skirt, working my fingers into her knickers, her hips thrusting and bouncing with impatience. I growl and teeth at her neck, which tastes of sun and salt, and beneath my fingers her flesh is damp and paper-thin. It feels as if I could reach right through it, up into the heart of her. After a few minutes of haggard panting she compresses her thighs and arches her back, making an obscenely high, monkeyish noise, like one trying to stifle a scream. At this I shudder and mess my trousers like a schoolboy. She slumps over and exhales, brushing hair away from her sweaty face, then leaps from my lap for another book.

Our trysts are always an issue of compromise and exchange. She is too young (almost sixteen, but in sad possession of a toddler's attention span) to train her passion on me fully, easily distracted by childish wants for sweets and stories and new shoes. There are times when I have had to use all of my cunning in order to guide her restless prowling in the proper direction, towards me. If she were any other girl, if she did not in fact already belong to me, I would have perhaps taken her by force long ago. But I have never been one who abides any abuse of my belongings--not even if it comes from me.

"You're out of sweets," she says, frowning at the barren state of my desk drawers. "There are no more Honeydukes or caramel custards or anything."

I emerge naked from the bathroom and smile thinly, then tell her that it is perhaps time for her to develop a taste for other sweets. Her eyes travel over me and fill with a maddening amusement. She already knows about those sort of sweets, she says, curling her lip like a braggart. I laugh low to make my doubt of her known, and arrange myself business like on the bed, thumbing through one of her Witch Weeklys. Within minutes she is on me like an insect, crawling and biting and seeking out nectar. Her mouth expands and her tongue licks and laps with a comical series of slurps and swallows (she proves herself a liar--this is something she has never done, except perhaps on ice lollies). She thinks herself a cute tease, but the warning yank I give her hair darkens her eyes and improves her performance. I scratch at her scalp and provide measure to her movements, a much more pleasant rhythm taking over as her little tongue corkscrews. Oh, my little flower.

"Oh, ick," she mutters thickly after the denouement, leaning over and spitting onto the floor. Clean it up, I tell her, and then we'll find you some cakes.

My Pansy is a little nihilist who loves nothing and lives only for the chase of fleeting, shallow pleasures. Her world is one of lurid, "how to please your wizard" magazine quizzes, marathon bubble baths, hijacked nips from my bottles of scotch (she thinks I don't notice), and frilly costumes with feathers and petticoats. Even my sensitive, probing questions on the murder of her parents triggered nothing more that one of those trademark shrugs. "We never got on particularly well anyway," she said, as if happy to be rid of their burden. And then she changed the subject, quick as a dipping candle flame, to the small selection of books that I had forbidden her to touch.

Blue books, my Father had called them. Stories of empty-headed whores and sluts who bowed and worshipped at every man they came in contact with. The prose between their pages is clumsy and purple, hardly quality, but she begged and begged me to read them. I told her that if she sat still, and was quiet and good, I would read to her.

Picture it, then: a man who has just arrived at the full of his mature powers, sitting in a wide armchair and sipping from a glass of fizzy water, clearing his throat to narrate lusty tales to his doting daughter. She herself is stretched out, stomach-down on the chesterfield, her cheeks pink and lips distorted (bunched up against a pillow) as she listens with closed eyes. In a calm and mellow voice, I tell of women who sit astride men and beg to be touched, kneading their own breasts and mewing in desperation. She rolls her eyes and huffs, as if doubting this, but wriggles her hips noticeably into the cushions of the chesterfield. I tell of men who tie women down and force themselves into the waiting women's throats, who in turn suck and swallow as if they are starving. I tell of orgies that involve grotesque phrases like "sweaty, turgid flesh." It is all ridiculously coarse and base, nothing but concentrated wank-off material for men who find themselves with an extra five minutes in the loo. But still I read on, like an agreeable Professor.

"Don't read anymore," she says in a gasp, thrusting her hands up her skirt and raising her arse in the air. I shut the book, dimly amazed. She turns her head toward me, her hair covering her face and puffing out with the force of her own ragged breathing. I am at immediate attention.

"Come here," she demands, her voice gritty with impatience. I position myself behind her, moaning wonderously into the small of her back, my hands seeking out the buttons of her blouse. "No, no, no," she complains, striking at them. Then she grunts and bumps her arse into my torso. I unfasten my trousers and slip inside her, quick as a whisper (too quickly--who has fondled my flower before me? Who, who?), and she bounces and bobs backwards, rough and impatient as anything. I close my eyes and hiss, my hands planted on either side of her hips; a single glimpse lets me see the white flash of her hand, her breath high and keening as she raises her arse higher, meeting me with a groan. When I feel her tighten around me I pull out at once, leaving a mess on her pristine backside.

"Oh!" she says, reaching around and feeling the stuff. "Oh, ugh. Why did you do that?" She glares at me furiously, as if I am a dog who's just pissed on her leg.

"Because, my dear," I return haughtily, flipping her skirt down over the evidence. "I already have one son and I do not want another."

The look that she gives me then is beyond dark and strange. It makes me feel as if I know nothing about her. Nothing at all.

***

I am the surveyor of my kingdom. I cannot touch my kingdom, cannot smell it or study it, but it is mine, all mine. My daughter has taken to visiting me less often these days. School will be starting soon, she says, and she still has a life, in case I've forgotten. I have not forgotten. How can I when my eyes follow her through these rooms, trained on her like a guardian angel's? I am watching as she orders a house elf to bring a sandwich and then eats it at a window, finally depositing the half-eaten thing on the sill and wandering away to curl her hair. I am watching as she sits on the back lawn and twirls a rouge dandelion between her thumb and forefinger, slowly amputating its head of golden petals. She is as restless as always, but it seems to be tempered with a newly learned patience, as if she is holding her runaway nature at bay with a particularly calming and special thought. What that thought is I do not know. I only know that it has nothing to do with me.

It should have something to do with me.

I imagine what Narcissa would have said to her if she had happened to discover our warm and summery lovemaking. I imagine her biting her fingernails into the back of Pansy's neck, listen here, little she-witch... I watch anxiously when Pansy comes into Narcissa's room at night, flushed and crying (she has never cried in front of me). Her face is screwed up with unabashed wailing, and Narcissa's starts from bed as if answering a nightmarish siren. Soon she is wrapping the girl up in a quilt and pouring out tea, her fingers thumbing away tears. "This will take care of it," she says, her voice soothing. "The cramps will be gone in no time."

I cannot sleep. How can I sleep in such absolute darkness? I watch the urn. Where is she? My daughter. Where has she gone?

Come morning there she is, sitting at the vanity and brushing her hair (she took up this habit recently and it is one of the few that can hold her attention--indeed, she will often sit and brush her hair for minutes at a time). But when I look again she has gone, her shadow getting smaller and smaller as she moves hurriedly down the front walk. Why in such a hurry? I picture her meeting an Auror in the village, cheerfully gorging herself on ice cream and humbugs while he prepares his wand for a dose of Imperio, swift and efficient. Take me to your Father, little one. I pace and fret anxiously at the thought of her being kidnapped and tortured, gutted like a soft-bellied fish and hung out for a King's ransom. A house elf comes down with dinner and I howl like a beast, scaring it back to the stairs.

There she is, finally, lounging in the library and listening to horrible pop tunes on the

wireless. Draco stands in the doorway and tells her to turn the bloody thing down (good boy). She lowers the volume a notch and says something smart in return, flipping her hair from one shoulder to the other. Draco says something I can't quite make out ("I won't shut the door"? "Not like before"?), his hands fisted into his trouser pockets. She nods and turns her head, her expression hidden from me, and Draco finally exits, flipping off the wireless in defiance as he goes.

Past midnight. She should be in her bed. She should be in the house. She should be here, in this room of safety and retreat. My pores ooze cold sweat onto the sheets. Wide-awake nightmares have me tossing and turning until the bedding threatens to drown me. I swallow scotch like water and it does little to deaden my nerves. The cold water I splash on my face drips down my neck indifferently. It might as well be air.

***

What an unearthly place my own Manor is. It smells of marble and galleons, like a Gringotts vault, and my feet make no sound as I navigate its hallways. I want to stamp and stomp through my home as I did before, but I don't dare. I am nothing but a ghost now.

I can see a light in the distance, just beyond a turn in the woods. I move toward it. I always move toward it, the rushes and leaves noiseless as I pass.

It leads me to an abandoned gardener's hut, a dilapidated thing that children play in sometimes. I can hear a mountain of clay pots tumble over inside it, and voices, low and laughing. My skin goes tight with goose flesh--my ghost knows the ghost of that voice. It tugs at me and brings me closer to the window (the glass was broken out long ago).

Through its empty frame I can see them, two figures twined together as one, a slow-motion flurry of lingering caresses and deep tongue kisses.

She tilts her chin up and looks at her paramour with such frank and honest adoration that I cannot, no matter how I try, avert my eyes. She is a new creature here, in this room, her lips parted with wordless longing, her eyes filled with more hunger than she ever bestowed upon my box of caramel custards. I feel the delicate neck of my guitar snapping once again, from somewhere inside me.

"I don't know," she says to her lover, her voice a wheeze of uncertainty. "I'm afraid of him." Afraid of whom, my flower? Say the word and I will flay him, I will skin him with a smile.

"He's not the same, not since he came back. Don't think of that..."

The boy's voice is as familiar as my own. How mesmerised I was by the odds and ends of her curls, by the glitter of the bracelet the hung from the white limb of her wrist, that I did not even think to regard him. But I see him fully now, running his tongue along the rim of her collarbone, his fingers reaching for the heart of her.

Treachery, oh treachery in my kingdom.

She is screaming by the time I pound open the door, and I shake Draco until the whites of his eyes show, hurling him over a table so that he lands, legs akimbo, in a filthy pile of tarpaulin, his hands held up to protect his bleeding nose. I take Pansy in my embrace and whispers soothing words, running my hands up and down and all over, washing away the memory of his touch.

"It's okay. You're okay, I have you," I murmur, kissing her bowed head.

"Stop, stop." She is overcome with emotion, her eyes spilling their hot salt. Not even her words can hold them back now.

***

And there I am, holding the world in my hands. My world. My hands.

I do not even feel the invisible noose around my neck at first. I am too busy touching her own--it would be so easy to snap it, you see, if only to feel her fall like a quiet doll into my arms (willing, at last). But the Aurors have me on the ground within seconds, their boots to my back so that my nose fills with dirt and my lungs cry out in protest. A half-dozen or more wands are held to my throat, and my arms are bound behind me, my legs weighted down with invisible shackles.

I turn my head as best I can and see Draco looking dumb upon the tarpaulin. Already he is beginning to sense how he will one day look back on this, how he will look back and see exactly how it was all his own fault. Soon Pansy is huddled there with him, her sleeve swabbing at his bloodied nose with a gentleness that causes me to struggle and cry out. But they are already dragging me away on my knees, back into that darkness that I had come so deliciously close to forgetting.

You can't do this. You can't.

You have to leave me a little something, you see. I need to have her.

I need to have my little bit of light.