Of Now Done Darkness

AN: Title from (Carrion Comfort) by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Thanks to Rainpuddle13 for the beta! Takes place during the first part of Deathly Hallows.

*

Sometimes, in the darkest recesses of his mind, he misses Azkaban.

His mind sometimes echoes with his own screams and sobs mirrored back at him in other people's voices through long stone corridors, but it had been better than this, his despair had been his own and he'd held - feeble - hope that his family was faring better.

He has become a laughingstock in his own home, at his own table, now headed by a monster wearing the face of his (old) savior, and Lucius can do nothing but sit and wait and hope and pray.

(In the first flushes of youth, filled with power and pride and the surety that he was invincible if not immortal - or at least meant to be - Lord Voldemort had seemed like the best friend he could hope for, powerful and proud and whispering of his triumph over death.)

Lucius had known true immortality when he'd looked at his son, seen his features etched on another's face and had understood truly why family pride meant so much to him, to his ancestors. (Voldemort does not care.)

*

The despair of Azkaban lifts at the sight of his wife and son, standing stiff-backed and brilliant against the darkness, and Lucius is shocked at how quickly despair came crashing back down on him after just a few, glorious seconds of hope as he took in their shadowed eyes, the lines etched in his wife's face and the fearful, broken tilt of his son's shoulders.

"What?" He manages, but no one says a word, and he felt - for the first time in a long, long time - lost, adrift in his own home, without any hints at what had transpired during his imprisonment.

"Your lovely wife has permitted us use of your home, Lucius," Voldemort says, voice oily and low, his strange, lipless mouth quirked in Lucius' direction. Narcissa does not twitch, but Draco does, looking ashamed as he does.

"It is an honor, of course," Lucius croaks, voice thick and uneven after so much abuse. (He hadn't meant to scream and sob, had meant to be stoic and strong, but as weeks turned to months and there was no word from outside and all he could see was his son's, his wife's lifeless eyes, he had begged - pleaded - for release, for news, for any glimmer of hope. It had not come.)

"The highest," and that is Bellatrix's voice, her breathy, pleased voice as she twines herself around Lord Voldemort's arm, and smiles up at him like he were the only light in the universe, and laughs as he pats her arm lightly as if she were a fond pet.

Narcissa says nothing, and her hand is gripping Draco's arm as though she were keeping him from fleeing. Lucius meets his son's eyes and sees only fear.

He has been gone too long, he thinks.

He does not ask for permission to embrace his wife, but stumbles across the room (he'd meant to stride, meant to be the master of this house that bears his forbearers' name, but he is weak) and wraps his arms around her as if she were the only thing worth saving in this world, and he cannot help but do the same to Draco, who is much too old for such open affection but Lucius has dreamt of this moment.

He and Narcissa, it transpires, have been relegated to a guest bedroom.

There, she whispers in fervent tones what has happened in his absence, how his son (his immortality) has been punished for his failure, and Lucius feels a heavy weight on his stomach as though he were back in Azkaban and surrounded with the broken dreams and the pale, despairing spirits that seep through the walls and make aimless, endless circuits of the prison, terrified of finding an afterlife filled with even worse horrors.

Lucius has failed them, she does not say, but his downfall is in every syllable. She does not cry; she is stronger than that.

She has not lost hope. That is the only reassurance left to him.

*

Lucius feels even farther adrift once his wand has been taken, as though he were gazing back at the endless sea that surrounds Azkaban.

"Lucius," the Dark Lord had said, his name hissed like a caress, "I see no reason for you to have a wand anymore."

It is the truth, yet Lucius cannot bear to think of it as such.

(He no longer matters.)

*

Now, Lucius is of little more import than the ghost who makes her way through the house.

Sometimes his listless paths through his home coincide with hers, and she looks at him with pity, though she has never spoken.

Once, she laid her finger against his lips (an icy chill that made him think, Dementor, and shudder and wish for the past) and stared at him with eyes that would be weeping were they not a mere memory of flesh and sorrow.

"We are the same," he says to her, and she tilts her head in what he hopes is dissent. He has no wand.

He cannot shield his wife and son from this terrible fallout of his own making.

The ghost drifts away - he remembers chasing after her in childhood, desperate to know where ghosts slept, and getting lost in all the turns and twists and always losing her as she drifted through wall after wall while he ran through doors and halls and windows.

He never caught her, but he discovered many of this house's secrets.

None of the secrets can help, now.

*

When he sees Bellatrix, he thinks of Azkaban (screams and aching loneliness and that breathless, weighted feeling he remembers from Draco's infancy, when silence lead Lucius creeping through the halls to stare at the cradle, that infinite, horrible moment as he took a deep breath before peering down to see that the child was still breathing) and his own madness reflected back a hundredfold.

She, not he, instructs Draco in the Dark Arts, in casting Unforgiveables and in the insidious uses of Legilimancy and Occulmancy.

"He is a quick student," she confides in him. "Squeamish, to be sure, but quick."

Sometimes when he is alone with Bella, she smiles at him as though she knows the shape of his dreams.

She calls his home her own - she lives here and breathes here and with her mad, empty laugh marks her territory. He does not tell her otherwise, though sometimes he hopes that she does not survive this war, because she is everything he hates about himself.

(Sometimes he imagines exorcizing her from his home, banishing her like a poltergeist, and laughs, and only remembers himself when he feels Narcissa's hand - warm and soft as dreams - on his.)

He traces the paths of memory, trying to find the root of his folly, the moment that changed his life and led him here, but he just keeps chasing memories back and back and deeper into his mind, until it seems as though this was inevitable (fate) and (destined) what he was meant to be.

Just a bit longer. Just a bit longer, until the end or until his end or until he no longer cares or minds or dreams.

Bellatrix is there, smiling at him with Narcissa's gentleness though it is her own fervor lighting her eyes. "Just a little longer," she says, as though she has been inside his brain (twisting his thoughts). "Just a little longer, then Potter will be dead and the rebels defeated."

Lucius nods, curtly, and pictures a world in which he has regained favor.

*

Narcissa runs the house, and reinforces the spells protecting their home, and stares blankly at the wall to the left of the Dark Lord during every meeting, refusing to meet his look, no matter how directly she is addressed.

Lucius waits and remembers. Hopes.

*

It is a rare thing to be alone in his house (it has become the palace at the center of the Dark Lord's empire, where Death Eaters congregate and prostrate themselves on his carpets) and rarer still the opportunity to speak with Draco alone.

He manages it one day in the gardens as Narcissa plies her sister with tea and firewhisky.

Draco looks frightened and - reassuringly - rebellious as he stares at Lucius. "I did my best."

"I know you did," Lucius says. He failed attempting to capture children, his son failed to murder the (second) most powerful wizard of the age. He cannot make accusations.

Draco pauses, then says, "I didn't really."

Lucius looks up.

"I had him - he was leaning there, and he was telling me that he could protect me, but I'd disarmed him and had my wand out and--" He stares blankly at the peacock. "I couldn't. I couldn't protect us. I couldn't kill him."

Lucius rests his hand on Draco's shoulder - he couldn't hug him tight, because Draco is a man and Lucius has no place trying to reassure him - and says, "It isn't your job to protect us. It's mine, and I..." He has never said the words aloud. "I'm the one who failed our family."

Draco looks at him with an avid, strange expression - Lucius can't interpret it objectively - and remains silent.

"All things must come to an end," Lucius says. He does not clarify what he means, and Draco does not ask. He leaves his son alone in the garden, unsure of what he has accomplished.

During his absence, Draco has come of age.

When he watches him, he cannot decide if he is feeling shame or pride. His son will be a better man than he is, but Lucius worries he will not survive the present. He failed him, he thinks, because Draco is soft. ("Coddled," Bellatrix had said with a snarl, and Lucius's hand grasped only air when he reached for his wand.)

But Draco is also good, which he sees in his reluctance and his nervousness (he couldn't do murder), and wishes that he had not brought this war down on their heads, into their home.

He had never envisioned this, yet...

It is entirely his fault. (His younger self would revile Draco, he thinks in the dark of his bedroom when Narcissa is asleep beside him, would call him weak and childish. At seventeen Lucius had thought himself invincible, and nothing proved him otherwise. Draco has learned the opposite lesson much earlier than Lucius, who is just now discovering it.)

It is a relief when Draco packs his trunk for school.

*

"We will endure," Narcissa says quietly, the blazing look in her eyes reminiscent of her sister's as she glares at the door. "Through all this, we will survive."

Lucius thinks of his son, pale-faced and trembling as he casts an Unforgiveable, and regrets. "Yes," he says. "We will not be our family's downfall."

The words ring hollow.