The Blessed Damozel

Notes: Title taken from a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Huge thanks go to my beta, Rainpuddle. Written for the 2006 Femgenficathon, for Prompt 90, I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.--Frida Kahlo.

***

Narcissa awakens clutching a pillow to her chest like a child (or a lover).

She releases it slowly, pushing it onto the empty side of her big bed, where her husband would lay if he wasn't... elsewhere. She tries not to think of him in these early moments of the day, when the potential for happiness still exists.

Narcissa's path to breakfast leads her past a door she pushes open and peers inside of out of long years of habit. The bed is neatly made, the surfaces spotless thanks to the tirelessness of the house-elf, and her son's personality seems to have seeped into the most incongruous of items inside: an autographed Quidditch poster, the bright spines of tasteless literature adorning his shelves, a picture of a brunette on the night stand.

She's grown used to his absence during the school year, and even though the sun scorches the lawn outside, she tells herself this absence is no different.

She shuts Draco's door and continues to breakfast. She walks the halls of her home with bare feet these days, despite her mother's voice chiding her in the back of her mind, because the sound of footsteps echoing through this big empty house gives her false hope.

After her morning Floo call from the Aurors (No, I have not seen my son. No, I have not made contact with my sister. Yes, I would be willing to repeat my answers under Veritaserum.), Narcissa prepares for a day in Diagon Alley. She cannot remain in her house like a prisoner. She must show the world that she is undeterred by the heinous and untrue rumors about her family.

She must.

*

Narcissa watches the dead rainbow of leaves dance along the pathways. It is chilly, but she insisted that she have tea with her sister outside.

"Don't worry about Draco," Bellatrix says, casually sipping her tea. "I taught him well. He will perform his duty."

Bellatrix's smile is like a jackal's.

Narcissa can no longer remember why she loves her sister.

*

When the shopkeeper hands her the package of sweets, she reassures herself that the trembling in his fingers is due to respect.

"Thank you," she murmured graciously.

The shopkeeper nods, and minds the till with more concentration than is necessary. Respectful, she thinks again. (Not fear. Never fear.)

When Lucius stood beside her, tall and proud, she hadn't felt the need to make such concessions.

*

During the painfully slow months that feel like they're building towards something horrifically wrong, Narcissa resists the urge to contact Severus to reassure herself that Draco is fine.

She tells herself it is because she would know if something terrible had happened to her only child. She would know the second something happened to him.

It isn't because she's afraid of the answer Severus would give her. She isn't weak like that, not anymore.

She prays that Draco isn't as weak as she believes. She also prays that he isn't as cold as she fears.

*

These days, Narcissa feels ancient. Her childhood seems as though it took place in an entirely different era, one of happiness and contentment, and since then the world has fallen into collapse and ruin.

When she browses in the most elite shops in England alongside witches with less knowledge of their genealogy than cattle, Narcissa feels like a lost and forgotten deity of a civilization long destroyed. Something mentioned in the histories and romanticized in literature, but as out of place in modern society as live sacrifice.

A Mudblood cow chooses the same scarf as the one in Narcissa's basket.

Narcissa plucks it out, never mind how the icy green would look against her pale hair, and drops it on the shop floor.

She can't sink to their level. She'd have nothing left of herself if she did.

*

Narcissa remembers her sister as a traitor and a failure. In her mind, Bellatrix's fervent voice hisses that she defiled herself and birthed an abomination,.

Narcissa feels like an abomination herself, now, alone and disconnected from everything that she devoted her life to. She sits in her sister's kitchen, filled with machines that seem redundant while in possession of a wand, and sips her tea cautiously, as though the Muggle mechanism that brewed it might infect her.

Andromeda's nose is still identical to Narcissa's, the same nose she passed on to her son.

"I just miss them so much," she says, interrupting Andromeda's tale of her daughter's vocational exploits.

Andromeda patted her hand, a sharpness in her eyes belying her pretensions at compassion. "They aren't dead. You'll see them again."

Narcissa can hear the words her sister won't say, the ones that add broken glass shards of malice to her terse words. "That's more than any of you deserve."

Narcissa wonders if she is the only Black sister born with a heart.

*

Narcissa has avoided social life for far too long. What with all the unpleasantness, she hadn't felt up to attending parties and being charitable to those less fortunate. She's ashamed when she thinks of it now, of course, but in those first long months of Lucius' confinement, she had felt as though there were none less fortunate than her.

That had been when Draco was still at home, laughing and childlike, not transformed seemingly overnight into a man at the murderous behest of a master she no longer respects.

Now, truly alone and without hope that her family will survive these dark days, Narcissa can see the need to be charitable to others. She can help others deal with the same sort of hideous downward spirals that she has been thrust into.

Her friends chillily refer to her as the "poor Mrs. Malfoy."

She grits her teeth and tries to assure herself that they are merely showing propriety towards someone whose plights they cannot possibly understand. (Never disdain.)

"There she goes, that Mrs. Malfoy," she hears as she crosses the ballroom.

"Slippery as snakes, the lot-"

"She's probably as deep into that business as her horrid husband--"

Narcissa is no stranger to harsh words and turned backs. There were days back then, when Lucius had been tried the first time and her sister had been put away and Sirius, her foolish cousin Sirius, had blackened the family name beyond repair, when the whispers had been loudly spoken statements and every eye had watched her, as though she were going to perform a murder or a sacrifice on the spot to homage her family name.

She had thought those days long past.

She does not let her facade crack, because the appearance of disinterest in what others are saying is the only mask left for her.

She prays her son will succeed. She prays he will not have to. She wishes for this all to end, magically happily ever after like in her favorite childhood stories, but knows it's unlikely.

She's already had her fairy tale ending. This is the price she's paying for the last decade of happiness.

She has to believe it was worth it.