Moratorium

i.

Yeah, these horns know red
And this bull knows best
Not to chase that scarlet cape
As the captive entertainer
Always blood to shed
To escape those crowds that pay
To see Taurus kill the tamer
-- Splashdown, "Lost Frontier"

Narcissa dreams that she is empty. She knows that she is dreaming (she always knows when she is dreaming) and wills the dream to change quickly. Any dream that starts with being empty cannot be a good dream. But whatever devices run her subconscious have long since grown strong against her will, and she dreams that she is, very literally, empty. She is hollow, a wonder even in the magical world. If her skin were hard, she would echo. But, oh, how thin she is and not even hungry. People without stomachs cannot be hungry (but she knows she is hungry because she went to bed without eating, and it's quickly approaching afternoon because she can feel warm sun on her face, and she still hasn't quite gotten over being pregnant, much as she has tried, and she's dreaming).

People stand above her bed, each wondering with what they should fill her. Bellatrix thinks they ought to fill her with cyanide to give her a nice almond smell. Bellatrix is a sweet girl.

Lucius raises his hand to silence Bellatrix and places it to his chin carefully in thought. He opens his mouth--

And Narcissa wakes, again, with a gasp. The curtains are opened just enough to blind her left eye with sunlight and illuminate a swath of floating dust particles across the otherwise darkened room. She reaches over to the night stand to grab her wand, misses, rolls onto her stomach, away from the piercing light, and finally catches her wand between her first two fingers. She flicks it at the curtains, accidentally opening them all the way, and she throws her arms in front of her face as though she's a vampire. Another flick, and the curtains swish together, leaving the room in darkness. She throws her wand back in the general direction of her night stand and falls back onto her pillow.

She did not sleep well. She has not slept well for some time. But as strong as the temptation to stay in bed and try to sleep some more is, and as strong as Narcissa's will in getting what she wants is (and at this moment, she wants nothing more than to get some real sleep--the resting sort), after eight nightmares and five times starting awake, she knows, anyone would give up and get up.

Narcissa always knows when she is dreaming. The previous night she had only seven nightmares. The night before that she had nine. On average, she has five dreams per night, ranging from utterly bizarre to nearly real, but no dream has ever fooled her.

She had an aunt once, possibly still did, who the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black denied ever existed. This was not uncommon for the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black. This particular aunt was a squib, or so she was as far as the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black was concerned. She was convinced that she was a bona-fide fortune teller, and, from the looks of her house, she had convinced a good many Muggles that she was. Sirius had taken her and Andromeda there once long ago, all three of them breathless, gasping, terrified that their parents would find out. She had been friends with Sirius once, too, before they grew into their personalities.

Her aunt told her, looking at her palm while Sirius snorted as he tried to contain his laughter, that dreams were the truest path to Knowledge, the purest conduit of the Sight.

Narcissa has never known anything before it happened. She just knows when she is dreaming.

Her bath water is warm, as it always is. Her first nightmare was about being too warm. Perhaps, if she believed in hell, she would have been frightened. But she does not, and she was not, and her nightmares, as persistent as she is, tried a different path. The next and the fourth were about being cold, and she woke shivering, her body unable to believe what her mind knew--she was only dreaming. Her third nightmare was about blood--sticky, fresh, in puddles all over the floor. But she's seen blood, felt it, shed it. Her sixth nightmare was of dried blood, and seeing it dark, flaking, staining, all over everything she owned frightened her more than its spilling.

Her other three nightmares were about being empty. Empty world, empty books, empty body. If she told anyone, she knew, they would pat her hand, chalk it up to her being recently not-pregnant-anymore, and tell her she would be used to it soon, an answer which would make sense had Narcissa ever adjusted to being pregnant in the first place. She was glad to be back to being just her, and the only thing she missed about it was having an honest excuse to explain her few extra pounds.

Empty books frightened her the most. Narcissa doesn't like books. Narcissa likes shoes and coats and jewelry. But as she thinks of the empty books while combing her hair, she begins to tremble again. It is silly to still be afraid of a dream once one knows it was only a dream. It is sillier to be afraid of a dream when one knows it is a dream while dreaming it.

Knowing that the empty books were a dream makes them worse.

Narcissa dresses carefully, as she always does. She doesn’t simply dress nicely. Dressing nicely is a part of being Narcissa Malfoy, as it was a part of being Narcissa Black. With a closet like hers, anyone could dress nicely without a thought. Narcissa is not interested simply in dressing nicely. People who dress nicely can be dressed by other people. No one could coordinate an outfit and push it at Narcissa and actually expect her to wear it. She dresses carefully. Before she opens her closet, she considers the hours ahead of her and what she will be doing--what she will choose to do, what she will be required to do, and what she will refuse to do.

Narcissa believes that, loosely, it is as some people say. Clothes do make a person. But unlike most people, she does not believe that clothing is important because it influences the opinions of others. Clothing is important because it influences the person wearing it. Any woman feels beautiful in a beautiful dress. And if she feels beautiful, she acts as though she believes she is beautiful. And from that sense of being beautiful comes a power over others. Narcissa thrives on this power. It is not that she is not beautiful on her own. She is stunning on her own. She is gorgeous. But if she were to wear rags, she would be unable to assert the power her beauty gives her.

But it not simply beauty clothes give. Narcissa firmly believes governmental people can act as though they are important because they wear clothing that makes them feel important. She knows that people will do things without qualm while they are wearing black robes and masks that they could never stomach were they dressed in any other manner. Had she ever doubted the power of clothing before these past few months, she would be a believer now.

This morning as she stands in front of her closet, she trembles. Today she must be darkly beautiful. (Beautiful and terrible as the sea...stronger than the foundations of the earth...was that how it went? Remus Lupin would know, which really did not make her problem less.) Serene and untouchable. A Greek statue, back before they began to lose limbs and heads. She does not need to make it through hundreds of years. She has only this one day.

She has clothes to suit exactly her needs on this day (she has clothes to suit exactly her needs on any day, really, no matter what it entails), but wearing them gives her little sense of power. She has dressed for what she must do after she leaves her house. Leaving is a more immediate problem, but as it lies between her closet and the rest of the events of the day, Narcissa has no choice but to dress for the larger problem that lies outside.

Thus the way her stomach has begun to flip into her throat.

Lucius Malfoy does not rage often. He has more subtle, more productive ways of applying his anger. She has only seen him rage once before (not at her, for which she is grateful), but nothing that gets in his path (which is bound to lie somewhere between her closet and the door) is safe.

She supposes he has good reason to rage now. Voldemort is dead. He has been for some twelve hours. Thus far, Narcissa doesn’t like the results. Her plans for the day have not changed, but now her husband's anger, an obstacle that she does not wish to face, has been thrown between where she now stands and where she must go to do what she must do. As she creeps downstairs, however, she realizes that something has tipped in her favor. She makes it to the dining room to fetch what she needs for the day without encountering her husband at all, and when she finally does step into a room while he is in it--the entryway--he simply watches her leave. He is, perhaps, a little dangerously calm, but nothing is thrown, whether object or curse, and for that she is grateful.

It is a long walk, but she doesn’t feel she can trust herself enough to apparate. True, she has passed the situation for which she was not dressed, but although the click of her heels on the pavement is as reassuring as ever, her discomfort has not passed.

She has never actually seen the used book store to which she is heading, but in her mind, she cannot expect much. It is a store that sells books; it is a store that sells used things; and it is owned by a Muggle. When she finally arrives--a little late, but no more than is acceptable--she finds that even her low expectations are a little high. The shop occupies the ground floor of one of the many five-storey buildings that line the streets. The building is completely unremarkable--no different than those on either side, or all the way down the block. That doesn’t save it from the fact that it is more than a little plain, ugly, and rundown.

The door rings a loud, annoying bell hanging from a string on the doorjamb. No one is inside. She takes two steps inside and stops, overwhelmed by the musty smell. The click of her boots is ruined by the creak of the wooden floor. A second of silence passes, then two, and then she hears a stumping and creaking like the entire building is about to collapse around her. The sound is coming from the stairs, and shortly a rounding man in a plaid jumper stumbles down into sight long enough to inquire whether she needs any help. She shakes her head very slightly, her lip curling a little, and he shrugs and starts back up, saying something she presumes was meant for her to hear, but saying it to the stairway ahead of him, his voice completely overpowered by the return of the house-falling-down sound. When that sound ceases, Narcissa stands in silence, staring at the shelves around her and trying not to cough. In a few moments her ears adjust to the quiet, and she begins to make out some tinny sound from upstairs--voices that sound nothing like the shopkeeper’s, but she hears no one moving around. She can only stand in place and muse on sounds she can barely hear for so long, so she takes another step forward, creaking instead of clicking.

Directly ahead of Narcissa, past the stairs and between shelves that reach to the ceiling, is an open door. She starts moving toward it and seems unable to stop until she reaches the doorway. The door leads to a smaller, rectangular room, with shelves to the ceiling on all walls and big, flat-looking pillows on the ground. Curled up in one pillow is a ginger cat. Narcissa can smell the cat. Every breath she takes seems full less of air and more of dust and smell. Book-dust, book-smell, cat-dust, cat-smell.

Crouched, flipping through a book, is Remus Lupin, his faded coat and washed-out complexion giving the illusion that he is as covered in dust as everything else. His back is to the door, but she knows he knows she’s there. She breathes deeply as slowly and silently as she can manage and steps further into the room. One step takes her to the middle. Two steps more and she would be standing on top of Lupin. He ignores her. She turns to her right and walks to the bookshelf (it takes her six steps), where she pulls off the first book she sees. She opens to the middle and is bombarded by a figure of two coils near each other but not touching, both emitting lines. She looks up quickly. Lupin has moved, and is now standing across from her, with another book open to the first page. She never heard him move. She looks back down at the figure. The label says, "Air-core transformer."

Narcissa slaps the book shut. On the wake of the echo, her tongue betrays her, and she is the first to speak.

"You can't ignore me," she says, and before she has even finished speaking, she has begun to click her nails against the hard cover of the book she is still holding, now clutched in front of her and close to her chest.

He glances sideways at her without looking up from the book, as if to say that clearly he can ignore her, but he eases the book shut and slides it back into place, taking an extra second to ensure it lines up evenly with the other books on the shelf. He looks back at her momentarily, then back to the ground, slightly shaking his head.

"I always figured you were the type who would play her cards close to her chest, so to speak," he said, "but I would have never imagined a book on alternating current would be so precious to you."

She feels the temperature of her face begin to rise and spins back around, slamming the book onto the shelf. In the process, she knocks all the others out of alignment, and she is not even sure she returned the book to its rightful place. But without another second's delay, she spins back around to glare at Remus Lupin. Her skirt swishes back and forth and then settles into the paralysis of everything else in the room. Barely ten seconds pass before Lupin relents.

"I think we need to call a moratorium," he sighs.

This was not the surrender she had hoped for. She doesn't even know what he means.

"All great writers agree that you should use words of Anglo-Saxon origin rather than unnecessarily complicated Latin-based words," she flails.

He looks at her for a moment. "How can you not have enough experience with Latin?"

"I was only informing you of the generally accepted truth. Clearly, I would much rather be associated with a great civilization like the Romans than dirty barbaric hordes."

"It means...a temporary truce?" He looks further away from her, back toward the bookshelf, almost over his shoulder and mutters, "I think it was more of a Greek thing anyway."

"Clearly not the word," she snaps. He is either trying not to laugh at her or completely repulsed. Neither is any progress. "A break," she says amiably (she hopes), "to chat between old friends."

Now he does laugh, but it's a laugh of disbelief. "We've never been friends."

She almost flinches at his effortless dismissal. "Well, if we weren't friends, then it was your fault."

He finally looks up at her more than in passing. "All shall love you and despair, huh?"

He is making fun of her. Her nostrils flare.

"You never made friends with anyone outside your little clique."

"I never did, did I?"

He says it with such a lack of tone that she cannot tell whether he is being sarcastic or realizing it is the truth. And she doesn't know whether she was lying or not.

When she doesn't reply immediately, he takes the initiative away from her.

"We're not friends because you're scary."

What?

"Manticores are scary. Dragons are scary. Taxes are scary."

He smiles at this. She is proud that she continues without pause.

"I am not scary."

"I think there are a great many people," he says, "who would disagree with that."

"Well, fine," she snaps. "I'm scary. Would you mind telling me why?"

He waves an arm down and back up at her clothing. "Did you look at yourself this morning? Scary."

Uch.

"I'll have you know most of the magical world--and probably the Muggles if they have any sense--would die to have my wardrobe. I have to fight off Witch Weekly's never-ending requests to 'do a piece' on whatever I happen to be wearing when one of them stumbles into me." On last year's shoes.

"Well, you're not exactly low-profile, are you? Mrs. Malfoy?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He sighs. "If you didn't want to be well-known, perhaps you shouldn't have married someone so well-known?"

"Honestly," she says, "Have you seen my shoes?"

He blinks--twice--and says nothing.

She feels some small triumph at knocking him off-balance, but mostly, she is annoyed. "It's not nice to stare," she says. "If you have nothing to say, you can at least say, 'um.'"

"Narcissa." He sounds tired. "Don't you have enough to do what with the whole plan to take over the world that you shouldn't be wasting any of your time teaching me your idea of manners?"

The day before, she would have had to bristle and earnestly deny any such thing. Now she stares at him. He doesn't know that anything is different. He honestly doesn't know. Not about Voldemort, not about the Potters. Not who did it. Certainly not who would be blamed.

(But what use is a Secret Keeper if everyone knows the secret?)

Of course he doesn't know, she berates herself. If he knew, he wouldn't have come. He is just waiting for his next instructions, for an owl or a casually passed note or possibly even a face-to-face meeting with someone carrying word of whatever the powers have decided he can do to hinder the "whole plan to take over the world." No one has bothered to tell him a thing, and she wonders how long he has been waiting. It wouldn't have happened like this at school. He hadn't been out of the loop then. He had, in fact, been very firmly held in place by both James Potter and Sirius Black.

But, really, if he would step outside and look around, he would find out pretty quickly. She supposes he doesn't go out much. Most people dislike a werewolf. The fewer people who know he exists, the fewer people who can find out what he is. And she wonders if that's the only reason he has fallen entirely off everyone's priority lists. It hadn't seemed to affect much of anything in school, but he had managed to keep it secret somehow. She does not know how.

(Except that she does know how. Even the nosiest of the students were much too engrossed in themselves to care about someone they barely knew existed.)

Narcissa hadn't found out until two months earlier when Lucius had been informed of the fact and promptly tried to use the fact to kill him. And he probably would have died if he hadn't had help. From his friends? No. Lucius had blamed the whole group of do-gooders, as had most everyone else, but Narcissa knew what had happened (they were not friends--they had never been friends).

No chance of help now.

Narcissa feels like she is about to topple out of her shoes. She can tell him. She may even break an expression onto his face. He won't cry though. She made him cry once in their first year at Hogwarts. She knows she will never manage it again. He made her cry in their seventh year, although he never realized it. Such is the way with Remus Lupin. The balances of power have tipped entirely in his favor, and he continues to present himself as an easy target. Whether out of obliviousness, habit, or intention, she doesn't know. She only knows it doesn't matter if he appears to be fragile; he isn't. He has depths of strength where most people have shells, and he will not be broken.

She cannot delay any longer, so she takes three steps forward and hugs him so tightly she can feel her heart racing. He doesn't seem to react at all.

And Narcissa has forgotten to draw her knife.

Narcissa shifts so she can let go with one arm, laying her head against his neck. He is considerably less calm than she initially thought. She finds the hilt of her knife and pulls it out of the sheath on her back just as he grabs her by the shoulders and pushes her away.

He blinks at the knife, and says, "Umm..."

They are standing too close. If anyone were to see them, false assumptions would be made. Narcissa presses the side of the knife's blade against her thigh, trying to hide it, not from Lupin--he's seen it; the damage is done--but from anyone who might see them. As if the knife would be the first thing noticed. As if anyone would be coming.

She watches him, and she can see him calm. In a few seconds, his breathing is slower, and he is more relaxed than he has been since she arrived. The part of her that has a brain begins to worry that this is Lupin preparing for a fight, and she has blown it all because she's a daft, silly girl, while the other half is bitterly screaming that of course, being killed is less scary than she is.

"May I ask what you intend to do with that?" he says.

"I'm going to put it in your stomach," she says.

"Ah," he says. Then, "If I were a Freudian, I think I'd be worried by that."

She wants to hit him, and although she doesn't know what he means, she's heard just enough about Freud to know she should probably slap him. But she has a knife in her right hand, and it's shaking so badly that if her next movement isn't to use it, she's going to drop it.

"Did you make it your annoying life priority to know everything?" she snaps instead. "Well, I hope you've gotten as far as you intended."

He looks down and a little away from her. She thinks he looks almost sorry. The screaming half of her demands to know why it is he feels he has the right to be sorry for anything, and then all the emotion she has been holding onto escapes. He isn't looking at her--he has dropped his guard--and she is crying angrily against her will as she steps forward and stabs him.

He coughs plaintively beside her ear, and then the knife's curse--Lucius Malfoy owns no un-cursed weapons--takes hold, and he slumps forward into her. She pulls out the knife and steps backward. She had no idea anyone could bleed so much so quickly.

She wipes her face with her left hand. She needs fresh air, but she has no choice but to apparate home. Her entire right side ranges from being splotched to being slicked in blood. She has Remus Lupin's blood trickling down her leg.

Her shoes tap frantically as she hurries up the stairs to her home. Inside, she has to force herself not to keep hurrying. She needs to get rid of the knife--it is still dripping all over the waxed tile of the entryway--and clean herself up as soon as possible. The blood is beginning to dry in places. It's not just becoming sticky; it's truly drying and beginning to flake off on her wrist, and she feels she might be sick. But if she hurries, her distress might attract Lucius.

She holds the knife in front of her as she walks to the dining room. It is dark, the curtains closed. The candelabras along the wall light in response to her entrance. She walks straight over the fireplace just inside the door, slides the knife back into its hilt, and places it in its holder on the wall above the mantle.

"I trust you didn't clean that," says Lucius.

Narcissa jumps. He is sitting at the head of the table, at the far end of the room, and he is calm, but she can still the hear anger in his voice.

"Of course not," she says quickly. Too quickly.

"Why are you upset?" he asks, cold and not concerned about her.

She breathes twice, deeply, quickly, and loudly, and with a final gasp sticks out her right foot. The blood that ran down her leg puddled unseen inside her boot, but plenty of blood dripped onto the crown of her foot and took various paths down the side to the ground.

"Look at my shoes!" she whines. She slaps her foot back onto the ground and lets the motion lead her to stomp her way upstairs to her room in what she hopes is a convincing fit. She pulls off her soiled clothing and throws it haphazardly into a pile against the wall for the house elves to fetch, hoping to add to the effect. Then she locks herself in the bathroom, slumps on the floor, and cries with her fist in her mouth. All the blood on her skin has dried by the time she turns the bath water on.

Her boots are ruined. Hence, she needs two new pairs of boots to replace them. Thus states the law of exponential clothing accumulation. The statement is repeated for each ruined (or worn or tired) item of clothing.

So, naturally, the day after she stabs Remus Lupin with a cursed knife, Narcissa Malfoy goes shopping. She wears shopping clothing, carefully chosen so she can look like there is no item of clothing in the world that could possibly make her any more stunning while easily being able to slip out of said clothing to try on other things. The ensemble is completed with reasonably sensible shoes and a plump credit line. She is simultaneously intimidating and irresistible to shop owners. Narcissa feels like hurling a vase at the mirror when she has finished dressing.

When she went to bed (she didn't sleep) the night before, she hadn't thought she would be able to replace her blood-stained clothing so quickly. She has, after all, essentially killed a man. Never mind that he isn't actually dead--he will stay cursed and unconscious for a time in days equal to the time the blood stays on the knife in minutes, and the knife will not be cleaned. She lay in bed willing nightmares as cruel and vivid as those Remus Lupin was now suffering upon herself but unable to sleep and bring them on, thinking deeply of a kaleidoscope of interrelated thoughts that came as a response to her desperate attempts to think of nothing. And she realized that there was exactly one thing she had to do, and she had to go shopping in order to do it.

She plans carefully so that St. Mungo's Hospital will be along a fairly straight-forward path between two stores she will visit. She can take a short break from her shopping to pop in and visit...an old friend...leaving the house elves taking care of her bags in the lobby well away from her, of course.

But there is a problem. The nurse at the front desk says that Remus Lupin is not in the hospital anywhere. Narcissa smiles weakly and shakes her head. "My mistake," she says.

She spends the next ten minutes in a stall in the loo, concentrating on breathing. Then she continues shopping. Before she visited the hospital, she had trouble concentrating, wondering in what shape he was going to be, and whether she could see him without being noticed. Now she finds it impossible to concentrate. After, in the second store she visits, she nearly matches pink with red, she gives up. It has been three hours.

She arrives at St. Mungo's for the second time that day ten minutes before visiting hours are up. There is a different nurse at the front desk, and Narcissa asks her whether there is a Lupin in the hospital.

"Hmm. Lupin, Lupin," she says five times, looking through files. "How do you spell that, now?"

Narcissa clenches her teeth and spells it very slowly.

"Oh, yeah, here he is," she laughs. "I was using two o's. Silly of me. Yeah, I remember him. Poor guy, only got here a couple hours ago. He got found by the Muggle police, you know. They only sent him over here after them Muggle healers couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. Well, besides the obvious." She laughs again. "Stabbed, you know. And cursed. And then when the Ministry got there to settle down the hubbub, they figured out who he was, and--" She leans forward and whispers, "What he was."

"Yes, I know," Narcissa shushes her.

The nurse squints at Narcissa as if just realizing who she was. "What do you want to see him for?"

Narcissa tilts her head up and gives the nurse her best "I'm rich, and you're not" look.

"Well, visiting hours are almost up now, anyway. Only two minutes. That's hardly enough time to get there."

"Just tell me where he is," Narcissa says coldly.

The nurse squints at her for a few seconds more, then relents.

It is a long walk to his room. They've put him in long-term care. And he has his own room. She's sure it's because of what he is. It's not a very nice room, but the privacy will make it easier for her. She's somewhat surprised (and very relieved) they bothered to put him in long-term care at all rather than just putting him out of his misery like they would any animal.

He looks sick, but that's not unusual for Remus Lupin. However, of all the people in the world, she would have thought he would look peaceful and innocent lying in a coma. He looked peaceful and innocent when he shouted at her for what she swore was a full five minutes sixth year (it was the only time she had ever heard him shout at anyone). But there, lying in a hospital bed, injured and unable to be awakened, he looks angry. But it does make some sense. She has known him long enough to know that he hates being in the hospital and always has.

She reaches down and feels his forehead. He is burning. The fever is the most noticeable thing about the curse. That and the fact that he cannot be awakened. She doesn't know whether the healers only put him in long-term care after they realized they couldn't wake him or if they know what curse he is under and that the nightmares will wake him when his time is up. She wonders whether he knows they are dreams or if he really believes he is suffering.

Even if she went home at once and cleaned the knife, he'd lie in this bed for nearly four years. And when the time was up, and he awakened, Lucius would check the knife, and she did not want to know what would happen to her then.

However, two nights before, the magical world had learned from Lily Potter that there is a very powerful way to block curses. The world was just too stupid to realize it, and thought it had something to do with the boy, which it did, but indirectly. Narcissa had understood the circumstances immediately, although she had not realized the implications for nearly twenty-four hours. No one would believe her if she told them. They believe her incapable of the requirement, and thus incapable of understanding it. But she isn't, and she knows exactly what happened at the Potters.

Narcissa is no prophet, not even a seer, but perhaps she always has had a bit of the Sight, if not enough to be useful. It's all she can think of to explain why it all started in the first place. She had certainly had no real reason to pay any attention to him in the beginning. No one did, which was why there were so many people even when they graduated who knew the name but couldn't place it to a face.

She leans down and kisses Remus Lupin on the forehead. Her lips burn. He blinks at her.

She says, "Umm..."